Designing Development-Oriented International E-Commerce Agreements

The research presented in this thesis focuses on designing development-oriented international e-commerce agreements. The attention is on countries that have low levels of digital capacities, referred to as Digitally Developing Countries (DDCs). The research used examples from Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda to illustrate the concerns of DDCs. The main research question of this thesis is: How should international e-commerce agreements be designed to meet the development objectives of digitally developing countries? Analysing e-commerce agreements requires a development-oriented framework that takes a balanced approach to promoting trade liberalisation while allowing protectionist measures, in line with the infant industry argument and the concept of embedded liberalism. Six factors are central to constructing a development-oriented framework for the analysis of e-commerce agreements. They are: facilitating imports and exports; providing for tariffs as a form of government revenue; attracting investment; preserving policy space for other non-trade objectives; providing development assistance; and providing for different rights and obligations according to development levels.