The United Nations placed small businesses, the online marketplace and women at the heart of the 2017 UNCTAD E-Commerce Week.
The year’s theme was “Towards Inclusive E-Commerce”, perfectly captured by a session on Thursday 27 April consisting of only women panelists debating how to support small enterprises in e-commerce. Hanne Melin of eBay’s Public Policy Lab was one of seven speakers in a well-attended session moderated by Arancha Gonzalez, executive director of the International Trade Center.
The session made one thing perfectly clear: online commerce, in particular when enabled by the online marketplace, opens up global trade to micro enterprises allowing them to directly serve customers around the world. The panelists acknowledged how small traders experience high barriers to export and discussed a variety of concrete solutions. Potential solutions included creating public-private initiatives to jointly raise awareness and motivate enterprises to adopt an online strategy to export, launching innovative solutions like E-Residency to facilitate enterprise formation, and creating “tax free” trade for small remote retailers to allow online commerce to realize its potential as a tool for development.
E-Commerce Week also featured the launch of an online platform by the E-Trade For All initiative, which is an UNCTAD effort, in partnership with eBay, that seeks to channel effective assistance to developing countries wishing to engage in and benefit from online commerce. Moreover, Hanne is a board member of the effort Business For E-Trade Development, created to support and advise UNCTAD’s initiative, which met for the first time during the week. Online commerce is today “widely recognized as an important driver of innovation, competitiveness, job creation and growth”, as articulated by the UN. To inform the week’s discussion around the type of policies that would support this, Kati Suominen published a paper (“Globalization 4.0”), presented during a panel entitled “Optimizing Trade Policy” that was moderated by Hanne and hosted by eBay, Huawei and Nextrade Group.
eBay thanks UNCTAD for allowing us to be a partner in this extremely important e-commerce trade effort.