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E-commerce and Sustainability: An

Overlooked Nexus

Victor do Prado and Yanis M. Bourgeois

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REMAKING THE GLOBAL TRADE SYSTEM

FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

E-commerce and Sustainability:

An Overlooked Nexus

White Paper by

Victor do Prado, Paris School of International Affairs – SciencesPo

Yanis M. Bourgeois, Economic Affairs Officer – World Trade Organization

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While Members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are still implementing

outcomes reached at the Twelfth Ministerial Conference (MC12) held in June 2022, the WTO

Director General emphasized the need to discuss the future of trade. The DG believes this

future to be “services, digital, and green”.1 Indeed, the future of trade will unavoidably be

shaped by various forces such as the digital evolution, the ever-growing importance of the

services sector and a set of environmental, health and social imperatives. XXIst century trade

is fundamentally more complex than that of the XXth century, which mainly revolved around

goods and services crossing borders. Economic integration has progressively deepened

including on issues that go beyond trade in goods and services. The deeper the trade

agreement, the more it touches upon areas such as environmental protection, labor standards,

intellectual property, consumer protection, the movement of people, technology, financial

assistance and human rights.

Among all the sectors of the economy, e-commerce is the one that arguably best

symbolizes the multi-faceted nature of today’s trade.2 E-commerce relates to goods, both

tangible and intangible. Buying a physical book online and its electronic equivalent – the e- book – are both examples of e-commerce. E-commerce also relates to services, whether these

are postal, transport and logistics services to deliver a digitally ordered good, or whether these

are purely online services (e.g., telecommunications, social media, banking platforms,

insurance, buying plane or concert tickets, etc.). E-commerce can be embodied by different

interactions, including Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, Consumer-to-Business,

Consumer-to-Consumer or Business-to-Government. E-commerce also relates to intellectual

property (IP) matters. IP is the main component of value in many online transactions,

1 WTO Website, News Item, “DG Okonjo-Iweala: Let WTO be an institution people can trust to deliver in

difficult times”, 6 October 2022. Available at:

https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news22_e/gc_06oct22_e.htm (Accessed on 5 January 2023). 2 The WTO’s 1998 Work Programme on Electronic Commerce has defined electronic commerce for the purpose

of WTO discussions as “the production, distribution, marketing, sale or delivery of goods and services by

electronic means”. See WTO Document: WT/L/274.