CECHAP receives Dr. Jingjia Zhang and Dr. Chenxin Jin from Nankai University’s APEC Study Center
On Friday August 23, Dr. Jingjia Zhang and Dr. Chenxin Jin, economists from the APEC Study Center at Nankai University in China, visited the Center for China and Asia-Pacific Studies to share their groundbreaking research on digital inclusion in APEC economies and explore opportunities for future collaboration.
The researchers met with the Center director, Cynthia A. Sanborn, and the team of researchers and faculty affiliated with CECHAP. In their presentation, they explained how improving the level of digital inclusion has become one of the important objectives of the APEC forum. In view of this, Dr Zhang and Dr Jin constructed a new framework to measure the level of digital inclusion based on three aspects; breadth (or the coverage of digital technology throughout society), accessibility (which refers to the provision of digital infrastructure at low cost and especially for disadvantaged groups and regions), and equity, especially gender and between rural and urban areas. They analyzed these three factors using important databases on the 21 APEC members.
In terms of breadth, they found that the level of digitalization in APEC economies is higher than the global average, but some gaps persist compared to high-income countries, mainly due to lower mobile phone coverage. With respect to accessibility, APEC includes the world’s leading economies, but there is still much room for improvement in the provision of Internet servers in less developed and more populous societies, and there is also the problem of higher costs of Internet use in individual APEC economies.
With respect to the gender equity and urban-rural sub-indicators, the researchers found that APEC is above the global average, but there is a more severe internal differentiation in terms of urban-rural gaps. Therefore, helping rural areas in less developed economies to increase internet penetration will be an important focus in improving the equity of APEC’s overall digital economy development.
Nankai University’s APEC Study Center, founded in 1995, conducts and coordinates APEC-related studies in China, provides consulting services for the government, promotes cooperation among the policy, business and academic communities, and conducts academic exchanges with APEC study centers of other APEC members. Dr. Jingjia Zhang and Dr. Chenxin Jin travelled to Lima to represent their center at the APEC 2024 Study Center Conference, where they presented on ‘The Assessment and Solutions for APEC digital inclusion’.
