After decades of globalisation and increasingly free trade, the world economy is going through a protectionist period. Trade wars and the potential impact of Brexit, amongst other things, could not only drive up the price of trade, they could also complicate it.
In the years ahead, customs officials across the world may need to check massive volumes of goods and companies may need to comply with increasingly complex import and export requirements, resulting in mountains of paperwork and painful delays.
The cost of all this is staggering, too: IBM estimates that the cost of administration is double the cost of physically shipping a container, while according to the World Economic Forum non-tariff trade barriers suppress global trade by approximately 15%.
