Publication: Regulating the Digital Economy in Africa: Managing Old and New Risks to Economic Governance for Inclusive Opportunities
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2024-05-29
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2024-05-29
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While digital technologies offer enormous benefits to the economy and society, they also expose citizens, firms, and markets to risks. This report focuses on understanding these risks to economic governance of the digital economy in African countries and proposes actions to mitigate them, enhancing the possibility of a virtuous cycle enabled by digital technologies. This report emphasizes risks of unfair and unbalanced market outcomes and misuse of personal and commercial data, complementing the World Bank report Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs, which focuses on closing the digital divide for households and enterprises. It analyzes the current context of digital market players and government actors along the digital value chain, including characteristics that could limit the development of inclusive, efficient, and competitive markets. The report distinguishes traditional and new risks to robust governance of the digital sector in Africa. Traditional risks affect a fundamental pillar of the digital economy: digital infrastructure that provides connectivity to access digital services. These traditional risks are related to the regulatory governance of digital infrastructure and channels through which the state obtains direct revenues from the sector: taxation and parafiscal fees on digital infrastructure and state-owned and state-linked enterprises. New risks are related to data and data-driven digital services that are essential to digital services applications that can expand the benefits of the digital economy. These new risks are related to unfair market outcomes because of weak competition and misuse of data. Finally, the report presents a framework to assess the level of risks to good economic governance in a country and recommendations to mitigate them.
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“Begazo, Tania; Stinshoff, Clara; Niesten, Hannelore; Pop, Georgiana; Chen, Rong; Coelho, Gonçalo. 2024. Regulating the Digital Economy in Africa: Managing Old and New Risks to Economic Governance for Inclusive Opportunities. Governance and the Digital Economy in Africa; Volume 2. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41620 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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