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Digital in sentence

2581 examples of Digital in a sentence

Education – one of the last big economic sectors yet to be transformed by the digital age – is on the cusp of a revolution.
Whichever path emerging economies choose for addressing these challenges must also account for the fundamental shift driven by digital capital-intensive technologies.
While digital technologies have created new kinds of jobs in high-tech sectors and the sharing economy, among others, they have been reducing and dis-intermediating “routine” white- and blue-collar jobs.
This shift would seem to favor the advanced economies, whose industries are at the frontier in employing digital technologies in their products and operations.
While global goods trade has stalled and cross-border financial flows have fallen sharply since 2007, flows of digital information have surged: Cross-border bandwidth use has grown 45-fold over the past decade, circulating ideas, intellectual content, and innovation around the world.
For example, while the United States may have been at a disadvantage in a world where low labor costs were paramount in global manufacturing value chains, digital globalization plays directly to its strengths in technology and innovation.
On its face, this shift to digital globalization would seem to work against developing countries that have large pools of low-cost labor but inadequate infrastructure and education systems.
Yet digital flows offer developing countries new ways of engaging with the global economy.
The near-zero marginal costs of digital communications and transactions create new possibilities for conducting cross-border business on a massive scale.
But the Internet cannot deliver such improvements in efficiency and transparency unless countries build the digital infrastructure needed to connect the world’s huge offline population.
Education systems will also need to keep up with demand for language fluency and digital skills.
According to another recent MGI study, there are also large gender gaps in access to digital technologies around the world, and this lack of access impedes women’s economic and social empowerment.
This is creating more space for national governments to intervene in the digital economy.
China, for example, has established its own digital industries, using policies such as Internet filtering, data localization (requiring Internet firms to store data on domestic servers), and forced technology transfer to drive digital development.
This has supported the emergence of major Chinese digital firms such as Tencent and Baidu, though it often has had adverse effects on freedom of expression and access to information.
Governments elsewhere increasingly view such digital policies as a way to catch up with advanced digital economies, like the United States.
But, while some countries have managed to take advantage of the current regulatory environment to advance their own digital capabilities, many developing countries risk being left behind.
Many developing countries agreed to liberalize cross-border delivery of services (so-called “mode one” trade), never anticipating just how dramatically the digital economy would revolutionize cross-border economic opportunities and enable more services to be delivered across borders.
In recent years, debates about how to govern the digital economy have intensified.
Multinational digital firms, mostly based in the US, have pushed for globally harmonized rules that would provide predictability and limit the space for national governments to intervene in digital flows.
Supporting such efforts, the Obama administration made the digital domain a core part of US trade policy.
The objective was to bring digital oversight to two major markets – the Asia-Pacific (under the TTP) and the European Union (under the TTIP) – as an important first step toward global rules in these areas.
Negotiations for digital rules under the TPP proved difficult, but ultimately were successful; the Obama administration overcame opposition by offering better market access for manufactured goods to some TPP partners.
TTIP negotiations proved more challenging, with some European states, particularly France and Germany, opposing the rules out of fear that they would enable US firms to dominate the European digital economy.
The election of President Donald Trump in the US, who campaigned on a platform of protectionist trade rules and support for “traditional” manufacturing industries, has called into question the future of digital rulemaking.
Trump’s decision to withdraw from the TPP was received very negatively by the US digital industry.
It remains to be seen how digital trade regulations will fare under the TTIP, which Trump has suggested he might revive.
Trump’s trade moves notwithstanding, efforts to update global rules governing the digital economy are continuing – within the WTO, and also as part of talks among the US, Canada, and Mexico to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
That may change, however, if the world’s three major economies – the US, the EU, and China – were ever to harmonize their approach to regulating digital trade and global data flows.
In such a scenario, the pressure on developing countries to accept digital rules would intensify.
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