Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/247407 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
JRC Digital Economy Working Paper No. 2020-02
Publisher: 
European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Seville
Abstract: 
In February 2018 the EU adopted the Geo-Blocking Regulation that prohibits any attempts to restrict consumer access to e-commerce websites on the basis of their nationality or country of residence. This paper seeks to evaluate the impact of that policy on crossborder e-commerce. We use page view data for about 10k e-commerce websites over the period February 2018 to October 2019, approximately 10 months before and after the entry into force of the regulation in December 2018. We classify the data in cross -border country pair traffic between countries of origin of visitors and countries of establishment of websites. Despite the fact that there may still be a significant amount of delivery restrictions in cross-border trade, we conjecture that any variation in traffic to e-commerce websites will correlate with variations in monetised e-commerce, even if modest. We find that the regulation increased real cross-border e-commerce activity inside the EU from 9.2% to 13%, depending on model specifications. It increased cross-border trade between EU consumers and e-commerce sites anywhere in the world by 11.2% to 11.9%. Applying different criteria for the definition of purely domestic websites slightly weakens the results for intra-EU cross-border trade and gives it a further boost for worldwide cro ss-border trade.
Subjects: 
geo-blocking
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.