The Digital Trade Revolution: How U.S. Workers And Companies Can Benefit From A Digital Trade Agreement

The Digital Trade Revolution: How U.S. Workers and Companies Can Benefit from a Digital Trade Agreement underscores the promise of digital trade as a driver of dynamic growth and good jobs in the U.S. and abroad. With details on a host of industry sectors and state-by-state fact sheets, the report shows that most U.S. services exports now have the potential to be delivered to customers abroad digitally. It also reveals how companies of all sizes have the potential to benefit from digital trade and lays out principles to guide the negotiation of a digital trade agreement. Additionally, it identifies a group of economies — dubbed the “Digital Dozen” in this report — considered potentially suitable partners to join the United States in a high-standard digital trade agreement, including markets from the Indo-Pacific and the Americas to the UK.

The digital economy has become critical to the U.S. economy, driving growth, prosperity, and dynamism for every state and sector across the United States. A diverse range of firms not traditionally seen as actors in the digital economy are producing digital goods and services, including businesses in transportation and warehousing, arts and entertainment, and even mining. Nearly two-thirds of the digital economy consists of digital services, not digital goods. The digital economy is expanding nearly three times as rapidly as the economy writ large.

Digital economy jobs are proliferating in the United States. Jobs tied to the digital economy can be found in nearly every sector, and their number is growing at a faster rate than that of overall job growth over the last decade. These jobs pay well, and compensation growth for digital jobs exceeds that for all jobs generally.

Trade is key to the U.S. digital economy’s growth. The bulk of U.S. services exports are digitally tradeable, but the potential for expansion of the digital delivery of services exports remains largely untapped.[1] Developed economies — and particularly Europe — are the top markets for U.S. exports of digitally tradeable services. These exports, coming from every U.S. state, supported more than 2 million U.S. jobs in 2020. America’s small business exporters are among those with the most to gain from digital technologies that have the potential to overcome the longstanding hurdles to exporting they face.

To read the full report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, please click here.