Corona virus and e-commerce

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNCTAD has played a critical role in raising awareness of the opportunities arising from the crisis through increased uptake of e-commerce and digital solutions. At the same time, UNCTAD has raised concerns about the risk of growing digital inequalities, particularly in least developed countries. The 2020 E-Commerce Week, organized virtually by UNCTAD and its e-Commerce for All partners, provided a unique platform to bring together a wide range of stakeholders to assess the impact of the crisis and explore key digital issues in depth in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a follow-up, UNCTAD has assessed the impact on e-commerce businesses across developing countries and least developed countries to understand the scale of the impact, identify key trends and challenges faced by e-commerce businesses, and public and private policy responses to the crisis. This paper draws on the results of a survey examining the impact of COVID-19 on e-commerce businesses from early March to the end of July 2020. It focuses on 23 countries, mainly least developed countries, in Africa and Asia and the Pacific.3 All countries have benefited from UNCTAD’s e-commerce capacity-building programmes, either through an e-commerce readiness assessment (eT Ready) or a national e-commerce strategy.