COLLABORATION AMID FLEXIBILITY
Mr Gan, who is also Minister for Energy, Trade and Industry (Trade), said DEFA provides ASEAN with a basic framework for digital rules, including cross-border data flows.
“But each country has its own specific concerns. Some may relate to privacy laws, some may relate to business confidentiality, some may relate to national security,” he said.
“So there are exceptions that will be allowed under this framework agreement. But what is important is that it sets out the basic cross-border data flow rules to allow data to be able to be transferable, subject to some of these reservations and concerns.”
Mr Gan said that DEFA is designed to be flexible and evolve with time, so that the bloc is not restricted to progressing at the pace of its slowest member.
“The important thing is we keep the door open for other countries who are not quite ready today, to be able to join in any time when they are ready, he said.
“I think this is inclusive, but yet at the same time allows us to progress at a much faster pace.”
Mr Gan said the topic of an agreement on the green economy also came up during Saturday’s ASEAN Economic Community Council meeting.
“Even before we signed the Digital Economy Framework Agreement, we had started thinking about the Green Economy Framework Agreement (GEFA), and therefore we had embarked on the feasibility study,” he said.
“Today we received an update, and we hope to be able to complete the study soon and launch the GEFA discussion next year.”
HOW BUSINESSES BENEFIT
On how businesses can benefit from DEFA, Mr Gan said governments can negotiate agreements with each other but it will be up to the firms to make use of it.
“We hope to reach out to engage the private sector, share with them what DEFA is about, what the digital economy framework is all about, and how they can tap on it to benefit themselves,” he said of efforts to raise awareness about the new DEFA.
He said that DEFA provides a framework for interoperability within ASEAN’s digital economy and lets the bloc grow together in the area.
It provides the rules for things such as using electronic documentation instead of paper documents, which will help to facilitate trade, speed things up and reduce costs.
Another area is payment systems, said Mr Gan.
Noting that payment systems are no longer used just at the retail level, but also at the business-to-business wholesale level, Mr Gan said these transactions can make use of digital payments instead of traditional bank transfers.
Digital identification is also another area that has to be developed, he added.
“It’s important that if you want to embark on digital trade, you need to know who you are trading with, and therefore digital identity for businesses is very important,” said Mr Gan, citing the possibility of an ASEAN-wide digital identification system.
Artificial intelligence and cybersecurity are two other aspects that DEFA would allow cooperation in, as they require collective effort to be able to make advancement, said Mr Gan.
