The WTO’s trade facilitation deal reached in Bali in 2013 adds to the past three decades’ dramatic expansion in world trade owing to tariff liberalization, regional integration, lower transport costs, and spread of global supply chains. Now 5 technology game-changers will erase many of the pending impediments to globalization – yet also give rise to new business and policy challenges:

 

• Consumer-powered commerce. Cross-border ecommerce will explode between now and 2025, as 5 billion to-be Internet users log-on across the developing world and businesses around the world build ecommerce capabilities.

 

• Virtual supply chain. Emerging technologies like nanotech, 3D printing, and robotics will power hyper-localized production and obliterate “Factory World” of outsourced production and global sourcing and shipping of components.

 

• Global data integration. Companies that connect point of sale and customer feedback data with operational, financial, and global supply chain data can mitigate the bullwhip effect, where changes in customer behaviors magnify across the supply chain all the way to raw material purchases. This is just the start of how Big Data will change world trade.

 

• Hyper-connectivity. In a world where cross-border business can be conducted by Skype, video, personal holograms, and hypersonic travel, cultural distance will evaporate – yet handshake and in-person lunches can remain at the core of doing business, also at the global level.

 

• Global currency. Bitcoin and other virtual money will streamline doing cross-border business, and they can coexist with national currencies and be used by banks and future peer-to-peer conversion platforms as a middleman that lubricates cross-border transactions

 

Here at Nextrade, we have occupied a special place at the nexus of trade and new technologies,and, with our clients, are working every day in awe of their potential to levela playing fields and expand prosperity. Nextrade CEO is poised to start a project with eBay and Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to further ecommerce and digitization around the world.