LEGAL AND REGULATORY GOVERNANCE OF DIGITAL FOREIGN TRADE AT THE INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL LEVELS

Аннотация

The rapid dematerialisation of cross-border commerce has outpaced the treaty architecture designed for a paper-based trading order. This article examines how digital foreign trade is regulated across two interacting tiers – the international and the national – and asks whether the emerging instruments cohere into a workable legal order or fragment into competing regional blocs. Employing doctrinal and comparative-legal methods, the study analyses the World Trade Organization (WTO) Work Programme on Electronic Commerce and the moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions, the plurilateral track that culminated in the 2024 Agreement on Electronic Commerce, and the harmonising model laws of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). Against this backdrop it evaluates the national framework of the Republic of Uzbekistan, centred on the 2022 redaction of the Law on Electronic Commerce and the country's advanced accession to the WTO. The findings indicate that functional-equivalence norms have diffused widely and durably, whereas the tariff and data-governance questions remain contested and institutionally unsettled; the collapse of the multilateral moratorium in 2026 marks a structural inflection point. The article argues that for a small, digitising, WTO-acceding economy such as Uzbekistan, alignment with UNCITRAL model instruments offers the most reliable route to legal predictability, while the tariff question must be navigated as a sovereign fiscal-strategic choice rather than a settled multilateral commitment.