This paper examines the role the digital economy plays in international trade impacts on Africa's economic growth based on 53 countries' sample from 2000-2018. We further divided the sample into five sub-regions, and the results are estimated by POLS, random and fixed effects, and the GMM models. The findings showed that (1) trade only has positive effects on economic growth when interacted with the digital economy in the POLS estimations, (2) Trade has a significantly positive impact on economic prosperity without and with the interactive term in the RE, FE, and the sys-GMM estimations, (3) the output elasticities of capital and labor have positive and negative impacts on economic growth, respectively, (4) the regressions for the sub-sample yielded statistically significant differences in the output elasticities for the indicators. The study recommends that concentrated efforts be directed towards developing the digital economy to ensure international trade's full economic effect in Africa.

There is a broad consensus that global electronic commerce needs the World Trade Organization (WTO) trade rules to govern it. The current mandate of the WTO is merely to examine the various trade-related aspects of e-commerce. Nevertheless, in recent years, some WTO members have put forward a proposal to begin negotiations for global e-commerce rules which was impeded due to the differing positions of developed and developing members. This paper examines the positions of the United States, the European Union, Japan, and China on the e-commerce multilateral rules negotiation issues. It then takes a look at the prospect of the WTO being able to reach an agreement on e-commerce. The analysis shows that the United States and the European Union have varying views on consumer privacy, information protection, and internet taxation. Although Japan sides with the United States on these issues and China is on the same page as the European Union regarding consumer privacy, China holds a different position from the United States and the European Union on the other two matters. China is not making commitments on data localization, free data flow, and forced transfer of source codes. Therefore, the outlook of the current e-commerce talks is not favorable for concluding WTO e-commerce agreements.

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