Trade and investment impacts of submarine cable disruption : starting to build the evidence base

John Ballingall, Deputy CE, recently presented to an APEC Trade Policy Dialogue in San Francisco on the trade and investment implications of disruption to submarine cables. The workshop was organised by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He first outlined the trade-off that governments make when deciding whether to invest in protecting cables from disruption or to wait for disruption and fund the repair work at the time. John then provided some information on the reliance of various industries on communications services to get a sense of which sectors might be at most risk from cable disruption. Finally, he used the GTAP Computable General Equilibrium model of the global economy to show the potential impacts of an increase in communication services costs that might occur if severe cable disruption were to take place.