The Future of Digital Finance Conference: Call for Abstracts

Sep. 24 and Sep. 25 – 7:00 a.m. EDT (UTC–04:00): Calling researchers! CIGI is hosting a virtual conference to delve into the future of digital payments across China, India and the African continent, examining regulatory collaboration, global governance, financial inclusion and technical advancements in cross-border payments.

We invite authors to submit a policy brief abstract on a related policy area by July 18. Selected policy briefs will be hosted on the CIGI website and influence discussions at the conference, and recommendations from the briefs will form part of the conference report. Learn more about the submission and selection process.

The event will convene policy makers, industry experts, academics and civil society stakeholders to exchange insights, identify synergies and propose actionable policy solutions. Registration is now open.

The resurgence of economic nationalism and protectionist trade policies since Donald Trump’s return to the White House has already triggered significant disruptions in global trade flows, the economic consequences of which could be recessionary in nature. In this article, first published by World Politics Review, S. Yash Kalash writes that in such environments, “digital assets offer several novel mechanisms for economic stabilization,” although “the deployment of digital assets as macroeconomic tools is fraught with structural, regulatory and geopolitical limitations.”

Kalash looks at some of these mechanisms and limitations, concluding that the strategic utility of digital assets “will hinge on careful governance, institutional capacity building and multilateral coordination to ensure they support, rather than destabilize, an increasingly fragile global economic order.”

“‘Canadian owned and operated’: that new sign has adorned many storefronts in Canada since January. Despite that, the clearest sign of dependence is not physical, but digital,” write Heidi Tworek and Alicia Wanless. For example, “American office software provided by Microsoft and Google has a 93 percent market share in Canada. Consequently, the vast majority of stores owned and operated by Canadians would grind swiftly to a halt if their office software were cut off.”

In this opinion, Tworek and Wanless say that Canadians can take lessons from the EuroStack initiative, and begin by “assessing Canadian vulnerabilities throughout the digital ecosystem. We cannot build a CanStack until we know what we need to build. More broadly, we can use this moment to evaluate and address the broader vulnerabilities in the fragile Canadian information ecosystem.”

The Digital Policy Hub at CIGI is a collaborative space for emerging scholars and innovative thinkers from the social, natural and applied sciences. Here are the most recent working papers published by Hub fellows.

Badriyya Yusuf: “Robust Digital Governance Frameworks in Africa”

Wim Howson Creutzberg: “Poor Cybersecurity at Frontier AI Labs Could Disincentivize Arms Racing”

Follow the links on the Hub webpage to learn more about the Hub scholars and their work.