Governments Should Embrace and Invest in Intelligent Trade and Technologies

By Jeff Rittener, Chief Trade Officer, Intel

While trade tensions have dominated the world stage as of late, new technologies are transforming trade processes by making them more inclusive, efficient, and intelligent. 

In Latin America and around the world, trade transaction data is a driver for new societal insights and business opportunities for government. However, the movement, storage, and processing of all this data—the fuel of our global economy—creates challenges for government officials who want to use data as a strategic asset to facilitate intelligent trade.  

Today, my colleagues Timothy Scott Hall, Fernando Loureiro, and Clifton Roberts published a whitepaper on the opportunity for countries in Latin America to embrace, champion, and adopt the use cases and possibilities of trade-related automation technologies. The Latin American region has shown its commitment to free and fair trade, investment, and the pursuit of multilateral free trade agreements and the modernization of regional trade infrastructures. 

Despite best efforts to systemize automated mechanisms to process trade data, processing transactions remain reliant on paper and people. Consider the acceleration of digital transformation before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public officials adopted and implemented new data systemization strategies to respond to and recover from the crisis. While pandemic data was abundant, it was dispersed throughout different siloed platforms. This underscored the need to further bolster digital capabilities.  

Timely information is crucial for making public decisions — whether about the health and safety of a community or trade implications of a particular agreement. In today’s post-pandemic world, efficient trade facilitation is more important than ever. Policymakers and trade operators need timely access to information to effectively manage supply chain implications. Adopting intelligent trade mechanisms to maintain the flow of safe cross-border trade will continue to be a key policy tool to address the pandemic’s lingering challenges. 

To this end, embracing and investing in intelligent trade and technologies is essential. Keeping pace with both evolving regulatory and technological environments requires trade leaders to have access to complete and immediate information. Operational public policy drivers are needed to fuel the trifecta of data, digitization, and technology. Doing so will set public sector leaders on a path to identify solutions for the world’s most significant challenges and a more intelligent, technology-neutral public policy, regulatory, and government investment environment. 

The decisions and investments of Latin America will serve as a catalyst in facilitating trade operations and economic opportunities from North America to South America and around the world. Intel looks forward to continuing to work with our global government partners toward this goal.  

Read the whitepaper here: