The Building the Foundation for the Global Digital Economy Conference (Digital Bretton Woods) is organized by Boston Global Forum, EY, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Connection Science, Prosperity Collaborative, and the World Bank on June 27-29, 2022 at MIT.
Global opportunities and challenges call for global action. The world is far past the Washington-consensus, in search of a new development paradigm. A paradigm that must reconcile national strategies for prosperity with the deepening integration of the world’s economies, driven by the digitalization of communication, commerce, and knowledge. This calls for renewed international cooperation and stronger global institutions.
The Digital Bretton Woods conference responds to this challenge through four themes of reinvention:
- Developing a Growth Strategy in the Digital Economy
- Investing in Digital Infrastructure
- Managing Disruptive Technologies
- Strengthening the Governance of Digital Systems
These themes are part of a single continuum of reinvention.
The first theme on growth strategies aims to reconceptualize growth in the digital era, recognizing that the systems of value creation are rapidly evolving, the product cycles shorter, and the policy handles changing. Importantly, digitalization calls for a stronger treasury role in coordinating public investments in digital platforms, leveraging big data for evidence-based policy making, and rethinking the government’s role in promoting innovation.
The second theme recognizes that governments play a critical role in regulating and investing in digital infrastructure, including taxation, trade, digital identity, and payment systems. These foundational systems improve how services are delivered to citizens and enable the creation of new markets and ecosystems in which private-sector firms and other players can compete and collaborate.
The third theme explores the opportunities and risks created by emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, quantum computing, and the Internet of Things. These innovations can impact critical infrastructure, transform industries, and redefine the way in which governments interact with their citizens. Consequently, the technologies need to be carefully assessed in terms of their economic and society impacts.
Finally, the development of new digital infrastructure and disruptive technologies call for strengthening governance frameworks to ensure that technology design and implementation, and multi-stakeholder collaboration around technology, are equitable and responsible. These governance challenges go beyond improving information security and privacy control. Core issues center around the delegation of decision making to autonomous systems on economic, legal, and administrative matters; reallocating the ownership of data to individuals and local communities; and the creation of trusted, decentralized information systems that respect privacy while promoting transparency and value creation.
This is a very significant event recognized by the Global Alliance for Digital Governance. At this conference, AIWS Government for Ukraine and AIWS City for Ukraine, as parts of the Rebuilding Ukraine program, will be presented and discussed as a pilot project for these reinventions.
