18 SEP 2026 — Costa Rica became the fifth party to the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement on 17 September, nearly four years after asking to join.
Costa Rica is the second economy to accede to an agreement that Singapore, New Zealand and Chile wrote for themselves in 2020, and six more have applied to follow.
What DEPA is
DEPA was signed in June 2020 and entered into force in January 2021 for New Zealand and Singapore, with Chile following in November that year. South Korea acceded first; Costa Rica is the second.
Its structure is unusual. Instead of a single text, DEPA is built from twelve modules covering business and trade facilitation, digital identities, emerging trends and technologies, and innovation in the digital economy. Because the agreement is modular, parts of it can be joined, amended or borrowed. That design turned an arrangement between three small open economies into a template other governments copy.
The instrument of accession was presented at the Future of Investment and Trade Partnership meeting in Auckland. Costa Rica had filed its formal request on 23 December 2022.
Who is waiting outside
Seven economies have applied: China, Canada, Costa Rica, Peru, the United Arab Emirates, El Salvador and Ukraine. With Costa Rica in, six remain.
China's application is what makes this agreement geopolitically interesting. It applied in November 2021, and the DEPA Joint Committee formally began its accession process in August 2022; that process has now run longer than Costa Rica's and has not concluded. The United Arab Emirates applied in June 2023 and has an accession working group.
An agreement written by three small economies has become a queue that includes the world's second-largest. The question members have been managing quietly for four years is whether DEPA can admit China without changing what its rules mean. Costa Rica's accession provides no answer.
Not the ASEAN one
DEPA is easy to confuse with DEFA, the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement, and at least one outlet covering this accession put the wrong acronym in its headline.
The two are different instruments. DEPA is a plurilateral agreement of five economies on three continents, open to any economy that meets its terms. DEFA is an ASEAN negotiation among the ten member states, aimed at the region's internal digital market, and we have reported how little awareness of it exists among the businesses it is meant to serve.
Singapore is in both, which is why the two keep getting mixed up and why the distinction matters locally. One commits Singapore to rules with Chile and Costa Rica; the other commits it to a regional framework with its immediate neighbours.
What an accession actually does
Trade ministers described it in the register these announcements usually occupy. New Zealand's Todd McClay called the agreement world leading in the ambition of its digital trade rules; Costa Rica's Indiana Trejos called the accession an important milestone reaffirming her country's commitment.
The substance is narrower than the language. DEPA sets disciplines on digital trade and provides a platform for collaboration on projects of mutual interest. In practice that means paperless trading, interoperable digital identities, and agreed treatment of cross-border data flows. It does not create market access in the way a conventional trade agreement does.
For a small exporter, the value is that a document accepted in San José is accepted in Singapore without a second process. That is unglamorous work, and it is most of what digital trade agreements are for.
What to watch
China is the one to watch. Four years into a formally opened accession process, the outcome will say more about DEPA's ceiling than any number of smaller accessions.
Watch whether the modules get used. A framework is only as real as the projects run under it, and DEPA's collaboration provisions have produced fewer public deliverables than its membership growth would suggest.
Singapore now sits inside two overlapping digital trade structures with different memberships and different levels of ambition, and ASEAN's own framework is the slower of the two. Which one ends up governing how a Malaysian or Indonesian firm's documents are treated in practice is not settled by either agreement's text.
