The Digital Economy Partner Agreement (DEPA) is an trade agreement with a specific focus on digital economy issues.
It was signed in 2020 between Singapore, New Zealand & Chile, coming into force in 2024. In 2024 Korea joined the agreement. Additional countries – China, Canada, Costa Rica, Peru, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and El Salvador currently in application to join.
The DEPA is a “standalone agreement” which focusses only on digital issues, as opposed to these being a chapter of a broad trade agreement. Such an approach has become more popular in recent years allowing rapid agreement between countries that are advocates of digital trade pushing broader rules.
Although DEPA is the most discussed, similar agreements include the US-Japan digital trade agreement, the UK-Singapore Digital economy agreement and the Korea-Singapore Digital economy agreement.
Rules
Rules such as DEPA tend to follow similar wording to digital trade chapters in other major trade agreements (such as CPTPP and USMCA). In areas such as cross-border data flows and data localisation text is very similar.
The major difference then is that DEPA is more comprehensive in its coverage. The new agreements covers several new issues rarely seen in digital trade chapters. Examples include single windows (linked to import-export), express delivery (linked to e-commerce), digital ID and AI amongst others.
Some have discussed DEPA as a novel “modular” agreement. These more innovative articles on new digital topics might be adopted by different signatories according to the suitability and development position, without necessarily adopting the whole agreement.