China and the U.S. creating most wealth in the digital economy
September 10, 2019 Category China News Round-up, Weekly
The first digital economy report from a United Nations agency has concluded that the United States and China are creating the vast majority of wealth in the digital economy. Shamika Sirimanne, Director of the Division of Technology and Logistics of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said that the digital economy did not display a traditional North-South divide. It is consistently being led by one developed and one developing country, the U.S. and China. The Digital Economy Report 2019 was launched at UN headquarters in New York last week.
According to the report, the U.S. and China “account for 75% of all patents related to blockchain technologies, 50% of global spending on the Internet of Things (IoT), and more than 75% of the world market for public cloud computing. The two nations also account for as much as 90% of the market capitalization value of the world’s 70 largest digital platform companies. Seven “super platforms” – Microsoft, followed by Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba – account for two-thirds of the total market value, the report said. Google accounts for some 90% of the global internet search market, and Facebook is the top social media platform in more than 90% of all countries.
In China, WeChat has more than one billion active users and, together with Alipay, an Alibaba company, has captured virtually the entire Chinese market for mobile payments, while Alibaba has close to 60% of the Chinese e-commerce market. The report outlines enormous potential gains from the increasingly interconnected global economy, but calls for “concerted global efforts to spread the wealth potential to the many people who currently reap little benefit from it”. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in the foreword to the report that inequality was expected to continue increasing, the China Daily reports.
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