Digitalization of the Economy in the Context of the Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals: An Overview of Key Expert Reports in 2019

This review examines the key 2019 expert reports on the digitalization of the global economy in the context of the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Noting the beneficial overall impact of digitalization on the implementation of the key SDGs in relation to reduced poverty and misery, and increased social equality and ecological balance, the authors of the reports focus on the challenges that digitalization poses. Among the most important are: the threat of increasing social inequality as a result of the new international division of labour, the hyper-concentration of the digital market, the growing digital inequality, the threat to information security, and the weakening of the regulatory capacity of the state. The authors of the reports note that digitalization is a controversial process that can both help to achieve the SDGs and unwittingly hinder their implementation. In order for digitalization to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs, targeted and coordinated intergovernmental policy involving national and business stakeholders is important.

Health Medical Tourism: The Present and the Future

Development of intergovernmental policy on health tourism is cross-industrial, with medical services acting as a promoting factor. Health tourism ideology is based on interconnection between the natural environment, transport availability, healthcare system and people. During health tourism travels people get in close contact with the environment in order to feel physical and psychological comfort without direct medical treatment. Health tourism is supposed to become the basis for alternative therapy and remain progressive. Meanwhile, dominating cultural aspects must provide competitive advantages related to non-clinical factors. Satisfactory health tourism can be achieved only with the help of a team of specialists having certain experience in both clinical and non-clinical healthcare.

Private roles in enhancing Multi-Level Governance: China's “Internet + ” national strategy

Multi-Level Governance engages players from multiple levels of governments and multiple sectors for better governance results. This paper argues that private actors may take a collaborative governance approach to facilitate intergovernmental policy making and implementation. Specifically, the rise of private sector economy in China has engendered interests and opportunities for resourceful private actors to link fragmented intergovernmental policy system. Using China's “Internet + ” national strategy as a case, the paper finds that internet firms, by adopting collaborative strategies like mediating, brokering, leveraging, and coordinating, contributed significantly to a concerted and swift process of intergovernmental policy making and implementation. Individual, industrial, institutional, and global factors together induced such unusual private activeness. The paper offers evidence of China's Multi-Level Governance practices and identifies an organic linkage in the formation and functioning of Multi-Level Governance.