While recent technological advances have supported an increase in digital trade, this growth has occurred with a lack of clear and defined rules. This deficiency has become an issue for Latin American countries. With the multilateral trade regime impasse, more complex regional and bilateral agreements have emerged. The formulation of digital trade regulation raises many questions. In this chapter we deal with the new rules on digital trade in regional trade agreements (RTAs) recently negotiated by Latin American economies.

This chapter analyses the impact of the internet on global value chains (GVCs) in Africa. We investigate the effect of internet adoption on forward participation and backward participation of African countries in GVCs. We conduct the estimations using country-level data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Eora GVC database and firm-level data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey. We test whether internet adoption facilitates the participation of Africa in GVCs at the country level and the firm level.

Blockchain technology holds considerable promise to boost women’s participation in international trade. Blockchain’s anonymity and efficiency could enable many women, who otherwise would be constrained by law, custom or high costs, to engage in financial and business transactions. Blockchain can be used to enable women who lack identification documents to undertake transactions that otherwise would require official identification, and to prove their ownership of assets without interventions from male family members.

Blockchain technology holds considerable promise to boost women’s participation in international trade. Blockchain’s anonymity and efficiency could enable many women, who otherwise would be constrained by law, custom or high costs, to engage in financial and business transactions. Blockchain can be used to enable women who lack identification documents to undertake transactions that otherwise would require official identification, and to prove their ownership of assets without interventions from male family members.

While recent technological advances have allowed an increase in digital trade, this growth has occurred with a lack of clear and defined rules. This deficiency has become an issue for Latin American countries. With the multilateral trade regime impasse, more complex regional and bilateral agreements have emerged. The formulation of digital trade regulation raises many questions. In this article we deal with the new rules on digital trade in regional trade agreements recently negotiated by Latin American economies.

The newly constituted International Trade and Investment Law Group (of Law Schools Global League - LSGL) presented four work-progress papers at the Research Workshop organised at University of Turin. The theme was: The recent trends in international trade: protection or protectionism? Four work-in-progress papers ar authored by Dr. Johanna Jacobsson (IE, Madrid); Dr. Ru Ding (CUPL, Beijing); Dr. Daria Boklan (HSE, Moscow) and Dr. Amrita Bahri (ITAM, Mexico City); and Professor Jide Nzelibe (Northwestern University, Chicago).

Dr. Kate Litondo from the University of Nairobi gave a presentation on ecommerce and digitization, covering the following objectives:

• Disruptive technologies of digitization in Kenya
• The Kenyan government digitization initiatives
• The benefits and challenges of digitization in Kenya