Keynote: Global Trade, Borders, and Technology

Abstract

Borders demarcate boundaries between regions and serve two, often competing, goals: Facilitating the efficient trade of goods, services, and passage of individuals with minimal friction; and enforcing the policies and regulations of each region on either side of the border. The past twenty years have seen a continued increase in global trade, excepting the 2007-09 recession, and this increase has progressed through the development of policies that are increasingly favorable to cross-border trade. More recent political changes are modifying policies and challenging the minimal friction of globalization and existing border functions. Here, these challenges and the opportunities for technology to mitigate them are examined. Examples include the extension of distributed ledger technologies beyond application to digital assets to provide identifiability and security of physical assets during trans-shipment. Furthermore, AI techniques and low-cost imaging can be combined with distributed ledgers to distinguish the true physical assets from counterfeit goods along the segments of a supply chain. Other examples examine the role of machine learning and knowledge graphs in understanding human migration.