Analisi Comparata dell'e-commerce negli Stati Uniti, in Cina ed Europa

Literature defines e-commerce as ¿the use of Internet to conduct or support business activities along firm and industry value chains¿ (Kraemer et al., 2011). Although the first examples of online shopping date back to 1979 (Aldrich, 2011), it was not until the dawn of the new millennium that the world witnessed an explosion of the use of the Internet for commercial purposes (Kramer et al., 2011). In the wake of the burst of the dot.com bubble, defying scepticism from analysts, new companies such as Ebay and Amazon paved the way, providing a whole new range of online services, soon mimicked by the more traditional ones, such as Wal-Mart in retail, Cisco in networking, Dell in the PC industry and Charles Swab in banking. The United States apparently played a major role in the development of such technologies and practices, and the rest of the developed regions, like Europe, followed soon afterwards. Developing countries are catching up quickly as well, as the impressive growth of the Chinese market and the case of Alibaba's IPO (the largest in history with a value of $25 billion ) demonstrate clearly. The value proposition of this thesis is twofold: on the one hand, it will perform an assessment of the state of the art in the three main global markets, namely the United States, the European Union and China: a contextual comparison is very important, since in each region e-commerce development took place along a particular path and according specific factors. Demographics, customer preferences, Internet penetration, the legal framework, economic contingencies, etc. all contribute to shape the environment and influence further developments. For instance, the US market is comparatively more mature than the other two but the Chinese industry, thanks to the much larger population of the country and the astonishing growth of the last thirty-five years, has recently taken the lead in gross size, retaining a significant margin for further increases. Internet penetration in Europe is heterogeneous (Eurostat, 2014) and differs from one member state to another, and one of the major challenges addressed by the Europe 2020 Strategy is in fact the creation of a Digital Single Market. China faces a similar challenge, when comparing the coastal regions with the underdeveloped western ones. The study will highlight the main issues faced by companies and decision makers, along with the business and policy approaches applied to tackle them. Regional perspectives and political agendas will undergo a comparative analysis, in order to evaluate their effectiveness in addressing matters such as customer protection, payment security, IP safeguard and revenue taxation, trade and revenue streams. Secondly, the analysis will focus on international governance and assess the state of things of cross-border e-commerce, what solutions have been identified by the international community to regulate its main aspects, covering for instance the prominent problems of double taxation and related disputes, costumer protection from counterfeits.