Over the past decade, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has emerged as a cornerstone of digital-era statecraft and economic reform. Foundational identity systems, instant payments, and consent-based data-sharing platforms are now being deployed by governments across diverse contexts to reduce long-standing economic frictions and expand participation in the digital economy. Yet, as countries from India to Estonia and Brazil to Nigeria experiment with building open, interoperable systems, the outcomes vary widely. For some, DPI serves as a governance modernisation tool; for others, it is a pathway to inclusion, integrating informal actors into formal markets and enabling new forms of economic agency. This growing global momentum has culminated in initiatives such as 50-in-5, launched in 2023, which aims to help fifty countries deploy core DPI components by 2028. But even as the international development community embraces DPI’s transformative promise, fundamental questions remain about how (and how much) these systems actually reshape economies.

The first paper in our series takes an inductive, cross-country approach to unpacking these questions. Drawing on evidence from diverse national contexts, it examines how DPI interacts with existing economic structures and institutional capacities. It conceptualises DPI as a set of four interlinked layers (identity, payments, data sharing, and discovery), each addressing a specific economic friction in recognition, transaction, trust, and market matching. The analysis reveals that DPI’s economic impact is not automatic or uniform: transformative effects emerge only when these layers cohere into a “stack,” amplifying one another through network effects and ecosystem coordination. Success, in this view, depends as much on governance and policy orchestration as on technical architecture.

You can download the full paper here.