A leading constraint to MSMEs to engage in trade and ecommerce is access to finance – for example, access to working capital to fulfill export orders. Online lending by Fintechs has emerged as a powerful alternative to bank financing, to fill these MSME financing gaps. What do we know by now about its impacts?     

Explorations of the “bump” from digitization on economic growth are increasingly relevant for developing economies where large shares of populations are joining the online economy. What, then, do we know by now about the true value of apps, digital platforms, and marketplaces to their users?

With millions of parcels and packages flooding countries’ borders, ecommerce is creating new complexities for customs and border agencies seeking to meet their triple objectives of securing and facilitating trade and collecting revenue. As a result, customs and border agencies around the world have set out to pilot blockchain and artificial intelligence as a means to automate risk management and fraud detection. What can we learn by now from these pilots?

One of main challenges for entrepreneurs and MSMEs to engage in formal ecommerce is limited financial inclusion of both consumers and businesses. Parties do not have bank accounts from which to send and receive payments; and MSMEs that need working capital to process orders cannot get it from banks. KYC Utilities seek to accelerate banks' KYC procesess - do they work?

Internet intermediaries such as internet service providers and social media platforms fuel the flow of information online, and generate an enormous value in doing so. At the same time this proliferation of the internet has caused growing concerns about online harms such as fake news, hate speech, counterfeits, and copyright infringement. In attempting to control these online harms, policymakers have been debating who is responsible for malicious content- the user, the platform, or someone else? 

The value of data in business continues to grow, and especially for MSMEs who engage in ecommerce, who need access to data on their operations, customers, and markets. With this rise in the importance of data has come debates on how to protect people’s privacy, with some policymakers choosing the direction of data localization, or requiring that data be stored within a country. Governments have made many justifications for limiting the transfer of data across borders, however, it has been shown that the costs of data localization are very real on businesses, consumers, and economies.