Emerging technologies have been and will be impacting all areas of social and economic activities, including transportation, education, finance, and health care.  While offering great promise, they also present unique challenges for regulators to strike a balance between promoting productivity and innovation, and maintaining health, safety, and environmental protections.  The GRP13 conference was held virtually to exchange notes among members and learn from the experts on their vast experience, lessons learned and best practices in improving mutual understanding about how regulatory policy itself is affected by the digital economy and in turn, how policymakers can improve regulatory system, making it agile to enable technological innovation. 

This report summarizes the experts’ sharing on regulatory design, delivery and reform with regards to new and emerging technologies, as well as touching on the relevance of the topics to the current crisis of COVID-19.  Performance-based regulations, regulatory sandboxes, international standards and international regulatory cooperation (IRC) were among the key points highlighted in the conference. Two of the key outcomes include the importance of private-public sector collaboration and further deliberation of the IRC.