Insights

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has launched the world’s first capacity-building initiative dedicated to raising awareness about the threat of economic cyber-espionage in key emerging economies across the Indo-Pacific and Latin America. Through a series of research reports, case studies, and learning materials, this initiative highlights how economic cyber-espionage is not just a concern for advanced economies—it is a growing risk for emerging economies like India, Brazil, and Indonesia, which are rapidly digitizing their industries.

Strategic competition is deepening existing tensions and mistrust between states and prompts nations to develop capabilities that they consider central to sovereign national power. Technological capabilities sit at the centre of this. It’s therefore not surprising that governments around the world are seeking technological advantage over their competitors and potential adversaries. In this context, safeguarding intellectual property (IP) has become necessary not just because it’s an essential asset for any modern economy—developed or emerging—but because it’s also increasingly underwriting national and regional security.

This report looks at measures that governments in various parts of the world have taken to defend their economic ‘crown jewels’ and other critical knowledge-intensive industries from cyber threats. It should serve as inspiration for other governments, including from those economies studied in State-sponsored economic cyber-espionage for commercial purposes: Assessing the preparedness of emerging economies to defend against cyber-enabled IP theft. Despite accounting for the bulk of GDP growth, innovation and future employment, such intellectual property (IP)-intensive industries aren’t held to the same levels of protection and security scrutiny as government agencies or providers of critical infrastructure and critical information infrastructure (Figure 1).