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The Emerging Policy Challenges to ASEAN’s Digital Future

The Singapore Institute of International Affairs’ new special report seeks to identify systemic challenges to digital growth and provides recommendations for dealing with them.

Launched at the Asia Tech x Singapore (ATxSG) summit, our partners at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs (SIIA) published a special report, “Charting ASEAN’s Digital Future: Emerging Policy Challenges”. The report offered research and analysis on ASEAN’s digital transformation through a lens of economic recovery, geopolitics, ASEAN integration, and sustainability.

It identified emerging trends in ASEAN’s digital economy, such as the growth of e-commerce and delivery services, the rise of digital payments, growth in data centres, and the resulting social and sustainability concerns arising from the digital economy’s fast growing carbon footprint.

As the Tech For Good Institute’s Platform Economy report shows, MSMEs and consumers have widely embraced the digital economy, and this has reaped great benefits for both sides. Our study found that over 82% of consumers felt that platforms improved convenience, comparison, and options. Simultaneously, over 84% of retail and food MSMEs found themselves able to reach more consumers with the proliferation of digital platform use.

However, the SIIA’s report flagged major systemic concerns that, left unaddressed, are likely to hinder this digital growth. These challenges include:

  • Gaps in existing rules for trade and investment, along with lagging regulatory cooperation and coordination about data policies and data management, diminishing the region’s attractiveness as a market.
  • Inconsistent physical infrastructure between rural and urban areas, thereby limiting digital inclusion for less developed regions and potentially creating a digital divide.
  • The potential for splintered digital systems that lack interoperability and common standards, limiting efficiency and impeding sustained growth. Geopolitical tensions — especially Sino-American competition — have begun to encroach into the digital space, leading to the limiting of supply chains, protectionist tendencies, and the race to form digital trade rules to maintain exclusive spheres of influence. This may force ASEAN to incur unnecessary costs at a time when it should be focusing more on infrastructural development.
  • Questions about sustainability, with new rules needed to ensure that the environmental impact of the digitisation process is mitigated, that growth remains inclusive and does not exacerbate inequality.

The report suggests that ASEAN governments must work together and harmonise on a regional level, creating clarity, common standards, and provide platforms for dialogue between the private sector and ASEAN regulations. Crucially, it also underscores the need to recognise the cross-cutting nexus between digitalisation and sustainability — the sustainability aspect of digital growth cannot be ignored, especially given the fact that technology can help provide the solutions needed to tackle the environmental challenges.

The Tech For Good Institute concurs with SIIA’s findings, and recently also examined the role private stakeholders can play in helping MSMEs pivot towards more sustainable models.  Whilst the platform companies in the region do not directly control their value chains end-to-end, they enjoy uniquely influential relationships and access with both consumers and MSMEs. This confers upon them the responsibility to educate and incentivise their partners towards transiting to a greener way of doing things. Innovative tech startups close to the ground are also playing an increasingly large role in helping MSMEs transit to a greener way of doing business, providing tech-driven solutions to everyday challenges.

Ultimately, a multi-stakeholder sustainability strategy is key. Governments and private businesses must support and collaborate with each other, building capacity and sharing expertise.

At the Tech For Good Institute, we welcome the opportunity to work together with partners and all stakeholders, so that Southeast Asia may realise the full potential of this digital age.

Read the full report here:
 http://www.siiaonline.org/charting-aseans-digital-future-emerging-policy-challenges/

Photo by Wanaporn Yangsiri on Unsplash

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Mouna Aouri

Programme Fellow

Mouna Aouri is an Institute Fellow at the Tech For Good Institute. As a social entrepreneur, impact investor, and engineer, her experience spans over two decades in the MENA region, South East Asia, and Japan. She is founder of Woomentum, a Singapore-based platform dedicated to supporting women entrepreneurs in APAC through skill development and access to growth capital through strategic collaborations with corporate entities, investors and government partners.

Dr Ming Tan

Founding Executive Director

Dr Ming Tan is founding Executive Director for the Tech for Good Institute, a non-profit founded to catalyse research and collaboration on social, economic and policy trends accelerated by the digital economy in Southeast Asia. She is concurrently a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Governance and Sustainability at the National University of Singapore and Advisor to the Founder of the COMO Group, a Singaporean portfolio of lifestyle companies operating in 15 countries worldwide.  Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology, business and society, including sustainability and innovation.

 

Ming was previously Managing Director of IPOS International, part of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, which supports Singapore’s future growth as a global innovation hub for intellectual property creation, commercialisation and management. Prior to joining the public sector, she was Head of Stewardship of the COMO Group and the founding Executive Director of COMO Foundation, a grantmaker focused on gender equity that has served over 47 million women and girls since 2003.

 

As a company director, she lends brand and strategic guidance to several companies within the COMO Group. Ming also serves as a Council Member of the Council for Board Diversity, on the boards of COMO Foundation and Singapore Network Information Centre (SGNIC), and on the Digital and Technology Advisory Panel for Esplanade–Theatres on the Bay, Singapore’s national performing arts centre.

 

In the non-profit, educational and government spheres, Ming is a director of COMO Foundation and Singapore Network Information Centre (SGNIC) and chairs the Asia Advisory board for Swiss hospitality business and management school EHL. She also serves on  the Council for Board Diversity and the Digital and Technology Advisory Panel for Esplanade–Theatres on the Bay, Singapore’s national performing arts centre.

 

Ming was educated in Singapore, the United States, and England. She obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University and her doctorate from Oxford.