ERIA, IDE-JETRO, and RIETI Hold Roundtable on Digital Economy
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7 February 2019Category:
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Jakarta. 30 January 2019: The Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA), Institute of Developing Economies Japan External Trade Organization (IDE-JETRO), and the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) co-organised a Roundtable Discussion on ‘New Global Era of Digital Economies’ in Jakarta on 30 January 2019. This Roundtable is a T20 Japan associated event.
‘In order to participate in the new global value chain, the human resource development for the digital economy is critical for the coming twenty years. The Phase 5.0, “Digital Transformation”, is presently progressing in this region and the ICT ability of “Digital Coordination” has been the most important in this phase. It is necessary to develop digital technology from primary or secondary school level to deal with the dramatic transformation of business model,’ said ERIA President Prof Hidetoshi Nishimura in his opening remarks.
Following the opening remarks were two keynote addresses in the morning session. The first keynote address entitled ‘Statistical Machine Learning in the Era of Big Data and AI’ was delivered by Prof Tomoyuki Higuchi, Director General of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan. According to Prof Higuchi, a great social change has been underway at a speed faster than expected, and the use of search engine further transformed the world.
‘Before the search engine appeared, knowledge was structured and communicated as objects such as books. For example, in a library, you can imagine when you want to search for content written in one chapter of a book. You know, or eventually know, what chapter, which book, which bookshelf, which aisle in the room. After the search engine appeared, knowledge is no longer structured for the general public. In other words, it became a flat knowledge system,’ said Prof Higuchi
Prof Higuchi added that for the young generation, the concept of sharing economy and citizen science occupies great value for life; therefore, it has become possible to start a business with relatively easy investment.
Director of European Centre for International Political Economy Dr Hosuk Lee-Makiyama delivered the second keynote address, entitled ‘Platform Business and Protection of Personal Information: Cases of the EU, the United States, and China’ in which he talked about digitalisation of the economy, evolution of platform economies, as well as regulatory and cybersecurity issues that arise.
The presentations in the afternoon were divided into two sessions. The first session, ‘Development of ICT and Industrial Development in East Asia and the Pacific’, was moderated by Dr Hyung-Gon Jeong, Senior Research Fellow from the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. The second session, ‘Economic Growth and Narrowing Development Gap by Utilizing Communication Technologies’, was moderated by ERIA Chief Economist Prof Fukunari Kimura.