Commentary

A recent working paper found that women in Latin America and the Caribbean with internet access had a 5 percent lower rate of job pre-pandemic job loss and about a 4 percent increase in their labor force participation rate than those without internet.

The word “innovation” appears a total of 97 times and “productivity” 63 times in Canada’s 2024 federal budget, and many measures targeted towards innovation and productivity reflect that focus. However, some of the funds being disbursed are tangential at best to actually addressing Canada’s declining productivity and supporting Canada’s innovation ecosystem.

Helping SME manufacturers adopt digital technologies will boost productivity, expand output, and allow them to simultaneously raise wages, compete in global markets, and be more flexible in their production processes.

Given that more than 19 states are in the process of implementing digital IDs, Oklahoma serves as a cautionary tale on the importance of building accessibility into the system from the beginning.

At the start of its digital transformation, Estonia had a GDP per capita of $3,134. By 2022, it was $28,247—an increase of more than 800 percent in less than 30 years. Its journey holds lessons for the EU.

A recent working paper found that, overall, global value chain participation raises labor productivity by about 20 percent.

A landmark ruling in 2015 made it harder for artists and record labels to determine where permissible influence and interpolation become impermissible appropriation and plagiarism. Congress should make things more consistent, accurate, and fair by directing the Copyright Office to launch a competition for the private sector to come up with an AI-enabled tool to compare how similar a musical composition or recording is to existing copyright-protected works.

Policymakers should not follow neo-Brandeisian calls to break up large companies because such actions will only hurt the economy and small firms

In many regards, the proposed American Privacy Rights Act is a reasonable bipartisan compromise, though its draft language still has plenty of opportunities for fine-tuning and three provisions in particular that would have serious negative economic consequences if passed into law.

Recent history has demonstrated that any federal privacy bill faces an uphill battle toward becoming law. However, the vast similarities between the APRA and ADPPA are cause for cautious optimism.