Johanna Hill, deputy director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), responded to Prensa Libre’s queries about the situation of the moratorium on electronic transmission tariffs.
He also explained that, when referring to figures, the WTO uses the statistics of services delivered digitally as a measure of what digital trade can represent for a country; However, that trade may be broader than what the moratorium covers, as each country defines it individually.
Even so, the official noted that digitally delivered services have become one of the most dynamic components of global trade.
According to the data cited in the interview, since 2020 global exports of these services have grown around 10% annually, and he mentioned what they detected for Guatemala.
What is the status of the WTO moratorium on electronic transmissions?
In 1998, ministers took the decision to create a multilateral moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions. At each ministerial conference that decision has been renewed. At the 13th ministerial conference, ministers indicated that this moratorium would expire at the 14th ministerial conference or at the end of March 2026, whichever came first, and at the latter, held in Yaoundé, Cameroon, members did not take any new decisions on this issue. So, that moratorium expired.
Moratoriums have usually been for a period of two years. There were two times when the moratorium expired due to a lack of results in the ministerial conferences: one in Seattle, in 1999, and the other in Cancún, in 2003. In neither case was the extension of the moratorium subject to any type of question or controversy, but rather the ministerial conferences were interrupted for other reasons. So it is a different situation from the one we face now, but there is a precedent that there has been a pause in the moratorium and then the ministers decide to resume it. But it is important to understand that, at the multilateral level, the moratorium is not in force at this time.
What products and services fall into this sector of electronic transmissions and what amounts can we talk about?
It is a complex question to answer. The decisions on the non-imposition of customs duties on electronic transmissions (in 1998) were political and compromise texts. In different countries, sectors might be defined differently, especially when we’re talking about the topic for statistical purposes, and I think that’s a warning that should be taken into account.
But to understand the importance of what digital standards are, such as the e-commerce moratorium, the best place to start looking at this issue is in the data. Since measuring digital commerce is a complex concept and collecting data is also complex, the data that can be known are those that relate to digital services or services delivered digitally, and these statistics available in the countries offer a good indication of the trends and relevance of digital commerce.
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Digitally delivered services include various types of categories, for example, telecommunications services, digital financial services, computer and information services, charges, for example, rights to use intellectual property; all that type of service comes in here.
But those are categories we use for statistical purposes; They may or may not coincide with the scope of the moratorium, because that in turn is the subject of debate among members.
What does this data reflect?
That digitally delivered services have been the most dynamic component of foreign trade in recent years.
Second, since 2020 the value of global exports of these services has grown on average by 10% annually. It is a faster rate than merchandise trade normally grows.
And when we measure this type of digitally delivered services in terms of volume, there is an average annual growth rate of 7%, and this trend has been greatly driven by work and studies done from home, all the measures that were taken during the pandemic, which gave an additional boost to what digital commerce is, and today we are seeing that with the adoption of artificial intelligence this trend can be intensified even more.
Economists at the WTO prepare the World Trade Report and last year’s report focused on the effect of how trade with artificial intelligence, working together, can benefit the different member countries of the system. One projection is that the widespread adoption and deployment of artificial intelligence can further intensify exports of digitally delivered services, and may grow up to 42% by 2040.
Regarding Guatemala, what we have is that the services delivered digitally by Guatemala represent around 33.2% of all the commercial services that Guatemala exports. And on average between 2020 and 2025 they have grown annually at an average of 4%.
Can we say that this 33.2% of the electronic transmission segment is what does not have a tariff?
No, we are talking about two universes: one is the statistical universe, which is not necessarily the one that completely fits the definition of electronic transmissions. But we at the WTO use the statistics of digitally delivered services as a measure of what digital trade can represent for a country. And that digital trade may be broader than what the moratorium covers, because each country is defining it individually.