The digital transition has become a crucial area of ideological contestation, as ongoing debates on digital surveillance and data commodification exemplify. Yet, we know too little about how political parties tap into these confrontations. This article elaborates a critical approach to map the ideological positions that 25 parties in France, Germany, Italy and Spain adopt on platform societies. The empirical analysis classifies parties' positions to uncover how their views on the digital economy and digital politics reshape their core ideologies. While parties are distributed along six ideological positions, most cases populate three types: Platform Neoliberalism, Social Liberalism 4.0 and Platform Socialism. These types represent the tripartite ideological divide on platform societies. Ultimately, this study provides an empirically informed theory of comparative digital politics and the foundation for research agendas on political parties' views on digitalization and the relations between ideologies, public policy and parties' organizational change in the digital age.

A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratising qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ — understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalisation — at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilise code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritising rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalises on the potential of platforms to realise monopoly rents.

This article explores digitalization’s impacts on the existing international investment law regime. In particular, it examines whether international investment agreements (IIAs) apply to the digital economy, analyzing their scope of application, including the definition of protected investment and protected investor, as well as the territorial application of those treaties. We conclude that the IIAs and their provisions are, in principle, not intended for the digital era. However, their usually broad definitions are likely to cover investments in digital assets, if there is a flexible interpretation of the required territorial nexus. However, we believe caution should be exercised about including digital transformation commitments in IIAs, as they could increase the chance of investor-state dispute settlement (-ISDS-).

In today's data-driven economy, data have been dubbed as the new oil. Hence, a close relationship is shared between the increasing amounts of international investments and the increasing volumes of cross-border data flows. The aim of this article is to discuss the legal aspects of the new data paradigm in the international economy and place this discussion in the larger framework of globalization and the Liberal International Order. The central thesis of the article revolves around the crucial role played by domestic laws in the fragmentation of international investment law. The article further discusses the interplay between national and international legal landscapes and how the changing nature of the Liberal International Order is affecting the flow of data across borders. In this context, it also discusses the issues that are presented by a lack of any comprehensive international framework governing Cross-Border Data Flows. The need to update existing agreements and laws in order to factor in digital investment is also highlighted.

This research commentary responds to Jiang and Murmann (2022), by offering further explanations for the miraculous growth of the digital economy in China from both the demand and supply perspectives. To complement their views, we identify several additional important factors, and classify them in three categories in an explanatory model. We believe that factors on the demand side played a primary role, along with innovative and entrepreneurial e-commerce service providers on the supply side. Infrastructures and government policies provided the foundation and a facilitating environment. We conclude that digital transformation of traditional industries will become the next wave of digital economy, stronger than the previous wave of e-commerce. Implications for research and practices are also discussed. In addition, we highlight emerging trends and turbulences. In conclusion, despite short-term turbulences, we expect that the digital economy in China will make big-stride progress in the long term, with strong potential to continue its growth.

To stimulate a debate about the rise of China's digital economy, this essay compares China and the US in one key area of the digital economy – e-commerce and internet-based services. China still lags behind the US in internet penetration, but it distinguishes itself by building a mobile-first, fiber-intensive, and inclusive digital infrastructure. A favorable infrastructure, innovations tailored to the large Chinese market, and local firms’ rapid commercialization of products and services turned the world's largest domestic population into active online consumers, helping China overtake the US by a large margin in retail e-commerce and digital payment. While China translated digital technologies into leading business-to-customer and customer-to-customer businesses, it has not been so successful in business-to-business services. The US is still ahead in the general-purpose technologies underlying the digital economy.

This study explores the potentials of digital transformation for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with emphasis on SDG 4 and SDG 9 in Nigeria. The study adopts a conceptual approach, reviewing existing literature to explore the topic from various views of authors on the issue. It focuses on the contextual factors such as stakeholder input to the process of the implementation of digitalisation and SDGs 4 and 9 which focuses on educational development at all levels, industrial collaborations and improvements, respectively. The results indicate that digital transformation potentially enhances the attainment of SDGs 4 and 9, but this is mediated by the level of stakeholder commitment and e-governance performance. Part of the recommendation is the adoption of a multi-disciplinary approach to development-oriented digital transformation interventions for SDGs 4 and 9 in Nigeria, through a process of effective stakeholder engagement and transparent institutional signalling. The study draws research attention to the use of digital transformation for social development, especially in a developing economy such as Nigeria, to enhance the compendium of knowledge in the implementation of digital approach to the attainment of SDGs 4 and 9. It is also suggested for the government institutions to take further responsibility to provide a fair platform for the implementation of digital transformation and the attainment of SDGs 4 and 9 in Nigeria.

For two decades, economic agents have been investing in the personal data-driven industry on the assumption that courts, the keepers of the legal systems, would have backed their claims, turning their technological control of personal data into legally protected property rights. Courts' backing has proved only temporary as they are now revising early solutions by constraining collection, use, and trade of personal data to protect the hierarchically superior rights. The theory of ‘legal bubbles’ rationalizes the economics underlying the legal shockwaves affecting the personal data-driven economy. ‘Legal bubbles’ tend to arise when economic agents invest in the economic exploitation of a new resource in a context of uncertainty and ignorance about the legal implications of innovative activities. These legal foundations may eventually turn out to be unstable as a result of courts' ex-post attempt to re-adapt them to the previously ignored implications of unconstrained commodification, with disruptive economic consequences.

After eight years of effort, the 15 Asian members involved in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) met in a virtual ceremony to sign the final document on Sunday, 15 November 2020. The final deal matches the original objective – to knit the region together and allow firms to build supply chains across the region to deliver goods, services, and investment to Asian markets more seamlessly. Getting this free trade agreement (FTA) to this point involved repeated missed deadlines, the loss of one important negotiating partner, and thousands of miles of travel for a rotating cast of officials, trade ministers, and leaders. RCEP began in late 2012 as an effort to unravel what has often been called the ‘spaghetti or noodle bowl’ of overlapping and inconsistent rules that can impede trade. While most of the countries in the region have extensive experience in trade and are outward oriented, trade in Asia has been bedeviled with challenges. This includes a range of both tariff and non-tariff obstacles that have made it more difficult than might be expected to trade, especially for final products, within the region.

Over the past 15 years, productivity growth in advanced economies has significantly slowed, giving rise to the productivity paradox of the New Digital Economy – that is, the notion of increased business spending on information and communication technology assets and digital services without a noticeable increase in productivity. We argue that time lags are the most important reason for the slow emergence of the productivity effects from digital transformation. This paper provides evidence that underneath the slowing productivity growth rates at the macro level, signs of structural improvements can be detected. In the United States most of the positive contribution to productivity growth is coming from the digital producing sector. The Euro Area and the United Kingdom show larger productivity contributions from the most intensive digital-using sectors, although the United Kingdom also had a fairly large number of less intensive digital-using industries which showed productivity declines. We also find that increases in innovation competencies of the workforce are concentrated in industries showing faster growth in labor productivity, even though more research is needed to identify causality. Finally, we speculate that as the recovery from the COVID-19 recession gets underway the potential for significant productivity gains from digital transformation in the medium term is larger than during the past 15 years.