Asia-Latin America B2B ecommerce in services: hidden complementarities?

As Asian and Latin American economies have liberalized their trade regimes, imports have become increasingly important for their export competitiveness and productivity growth. In recent years, improvements in internet connectivity and rise of sophisticated cloud computing capabilities have expanded opportunities for Asian and Latin American businesses source specialized IT, financial, engineering, and other business services from domestic and foreign vendors, and to incorporate these services into their own products and services.

Many of these types of business-to-business services are today digitally deliverable, meaning that they could be transferred to the customer digitally over the internet without face-to-face interactions that might be needed in, say, tourism, medical, or transport services.

In 2020 Nextrade was hired by UN ESCAP to provide diagnostics on Asian and Latin American firms' use of digitally deliverable services in their value chains for the Member Countries of the Forum of East Asia-Latin America Cooperation (FEALAC), and to develop actionable policy proposals to bolster digitally deliverable services in Latin America-East Asia value chains. Our report is here.