Major multilateral institutions have long claimed that their market-oriented trade rules reduce poverty and advance development. Instead, they hold back the developing world from a more human-centric, social-justice approach that it needs to reach its potential. South Africa has the potential to set an example of how a global “middle power” can drive change. The Covid-19 pandemic has provided extra impetus – and a test.
The need for cross-border data sharing throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the future of multilateral threat management will hinge on steady yet flexible open-data publishing norms and multilateral data-transfer agreements. In many ways, India typifies the perspectives and needs of emerging economies related to data sharing, data flows, and related commercial regulation.
Georgia remains a developing country even three decades after its independence from the Soviet Union and despite its strategic location and abundant natural resources. It has benefited to a limited extent from foreign investment and relatively recent free-trade agreements with the EU and China. But its full emergence as an economically and politically resilient State has been hampered by modernization driven development agenda and neoliberal policies with too little regard for their social and environmental impacts in Georgia, as well as highpressure, counter-productive trade- and lending policies imposed by global powers such as the IMF, the EU, the United States, and China.
Trade agreements have become an important battleground for tech companies to fight the regulatory pressure they are finally facing in the Global North. But allowing tech companies to capture digital trade talks to defang domestic regulation creates serious risks for privacy, fundamental rights, competition, social and economic justice, and sustainable development.