Democratic Issues and the Relationship between the Governments and Corporations in the Era of Digitalization

V-dem liberal democratic index shows that the democracy had flourished through 1970s to 90s, but declined this decade. The main topic of the paper is based on this fact that democracy is facing difficult time with the rise of authoritarian governments. Although it is difficult to see the reasons that influence democratic ideas to rise and fall, there are number of factors that could be potentially harmful for democracy. For example, corporate tax rate is lowered globally in “a race to the bottom” since financial deregulation in 1970s and MNCs, including GAFA, are enjoying the loop-holes with aid from tax-havens. Internet-giants are exploiting behavior surplus of users and are using it as a tool to lobby governments by sharing information with intelligence or helping election campaign of politicians. Concentration of economic and political power that GAFA enjoys are increasingly seen as a monopoly. To fix these issues, leaders of Western democracy, such as the US, the EU and Japan, are urged to increase their efforts in cooperating together to tackle the above-mentioned problems using tools such as anti-trust, effective R&D, minimum corporate tax, and promoting trusted free flow of data among like-minded countries.