Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The OECD Digital STRI identifies, catalogues and quantifies barriers that affect trade in digitally enabled services across 46 countries. It provides policy makers with an evidence-based tool that helps to identify regulatory bottlenecks, design policies that foster more competitive and diversified markets for digital trade, and analyze the impact of policy reforms. The OECD Digital STRI captures cross-cutting impediments that affect all types of services traded digitally. As a stand-alone instrument, it complements the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI).   STRI indices take the value from 0 to 1. Complete openness to trade and investment gives a score of zero, while being completely closed to foreign services providers yields a score of one.

The OECD Digital STRI heterogeneity indices complement the recently published Digital STRI's and presents indices of regulatory heterogeneity based on the rich information in the Digital STRI regulatory database. The indices are built from assessing – for each country pair and each measure – whether or not the countries have the same regulation. For each country pair and each sector, the indices reflect the (weighted) share of measures for which the two countries have different regulation.

The OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2020 examines trends and analyses emerging opportunities and challenges in the digital economy. It highlights how OECD countries and partner economies are taking advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to meet their public policy objectives. Through comparative evidence, it informs policy makers of regulatory practices and policy options to help maximise the potential of the digital economy as a driver for innovation and inclusive growth.   This third edition of the OECD Digital Economy Outlook provides a holistic overview of converging trends, policy developments and data on both the supply and demand sides of the digital economy. It illustrates how the digital transformation is affecting economies and societies. Finally, it provides a special focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic is amplifying opportunities and challenges from the digital transformation.