Trade facilitation has become one of the most effective policy tools available to countries in Asia and the Pacific. As geopolitical tensions, protectionism and slowing growth reshape the global economy, reducing the cost and friction of moving goods across borders can strengthen resilience, improve competitiveness and deepen regional connectivity. Artificial intelligence (AI) and digital innovation now offer the next frontier for making trade faster, smarter and more inclusive.
The timing is critical. The Asia-Pacific region remains the fastest-growing part of the developing world, but its outlook is becoming increasingly uncertain in the face of deepening geopolitical conflicts, rising trade protectionism, geoeconomic fragmentation and a weakening rules-based multilateral trading system. Growth among the region’s developing economies is expected to slow to around 4 percent in 2026, marking a fourth consecutive annual deceleration, as inflation persists and global value chains are reorganized around the logic of risk rather than efficiency.
The costs of this uncertainty, once again, fall disproportionately on the economies with the least room for policy support and the people with the least access to social protection. Responding effectively requires policies that strengthen domestic and regional sources of demand, deepen regional cooperation to offset global fragmentation and maintain investments in productivity, connectivity and access to finance. Trade facilitation advances all three. Unlike many other policy options, it does not depend on the goodwill of any single trading partner and can deliver broad-based gains across the region.
The next challenge is to ensure that artificial intelligence accelerates that progress while building trust, interoperability and inclusion.
Digitalization has already transformed the way goods move across borders. The next challenge is to ensure that artificial intelligence accelerates that progress while building trust, interoperability and inclusion. How far has the region come in digitalizing trade? How can AI improve the efficiency and transparency of cross-border commerce? What governance is needed to ensure interoperability across jurisdictions? And how can the benefits be shared more broadly and sustainably?
From paper to paperless: real but uneven progress
The case for trade facilitation rests on hard evidence. Every two years, the United Nations measures how many of a common set of internationally agreed trade-facilitation measures each economy has put in place, expressed as a share of full implementation. In the most recent round, conducted in 2025, the average economy worldwide had implemented about 71 percent of these measures, up from roughly two-thirds two years earlier. Asia and the Pacific kept pace with the improving trend. These gains matter because they translate directly into lower costs. Analysis for the region indicates that going beyond the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) to fully digitalize trade procedures could cut average trade costs by roughly 11 percent.
Yet the regional average masks a deep divide. Developed economies and the advanced traders of East and Southeast Asia have implementation rates above 80 percent, while Pacific island economies remain below 50 percent. The institutional centerpiece for closing that gap is the Framework Agreement on Facilitation of Cross-border Paperless Trade in Asia and the Pacific (CPTA), a United Nations treaty in force since 2021, designed as an inclusive, capacity-building platform accessible to countries at all levels of development. Fully digitalizing these cross-border procedures could lower trade costs further still, with the largest gains flowing to the economies that today rely most on paper. The fifth session of the treaty’s Paperless Trade Council, convened in Bangkok in June 2026, advanced precisely this agenda: the digital exchange of documents, such as phytosanitary certificates and bills of lading, and the legal architecture that allows electronic trade documents recognized in one country to be trusted in another.
The next frontier: artificial intelligence in trade facilitation
If the digitization of documents and electronic single windows defined the last decade of reform, artificial intelligence will define the next. In June 2026, trade officials, customs authorities, technology providers and development partners gathered in Bangkok for Paperless Trade Week. Proceedings kicked off with the launch of joint Asian Development Bank (ADB)-United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) research on a question that has moved from the margins of trade policy to its center: How can artificial intelligence (AI) make trade across borders faster, cheaper and more resilient?
Drawing on a survey of nearly 50 countries in the region, the report maps how AI is beginning to transform processes across the trade value chain, automating document processing, sharpening customs risk management, improving compliance and accelerating the analysis that anticipatory, intelligence-led border management requires. The promise is considerable: In a region in which trade volumes are immense and administrative capacity is stretched, AI can help do more with less, freeing scarce human expertise for the cases that most need it. However, scaling AI in trade facilitation depends on three enablers that many countries have yet to put in place: high-quality, well-integrated data, effective human-AI integration and a supportive policy and governance ecosystem.
Scaling AI in trade facilitation depends on three enablers that many countries have yet to put in place: high-quality, well-integrated data, effective human-AI integration and a supportive policy and governance ecosystem.
Of the three enablers, governance deserves the closest attention, since it is what determines whether the other two are used responsibly or not at all. These tools carry real risks if they outrun governance. AI systems are only as good as the data behind them, and poor or unrepresentative data can embed errors and biases, with tangible consequences when an algorithm flags a consignment for inspection or judges a trader’s compliance. Automated, opaque decisions can erode transparency and due process at the border; heavier reliance on a handful of systems raises the stakes for cybersecurity and data protection; and economies that lack the data, connectivity or skills to adopt these tools risk being left further behind, widening the very divide that digitalization is meant to close. The key lesson is that AI must augment human judgment rather than replace it, which is why oversight, transparency and investment in capacity matter every bit as much as the technology.
Early examples show how AI can support public-sector decision-making. For example, in the area of trade, the ESCAP Trade Intelligence and Negotiation Adviser (TINA) is an AI-powered assistant that mines large volumes of tariff schedules, trade flows and the texts of trade agreements. This support enables officials, including those in the region’s least developed economies, to identify export opportunities, model alternative negotiating scenarios and prepare evidence-based positions. It has been used, for example, to estimate that the erosion of trade preferences could threaten US$7-10 billion in annual export earnings for the region’s most vulnerable economies. The lesson is not that technology will solve trade facilitation on its own, but that, intelligently governed, it can dramatically extend what reform can achieve.
Trust, interoperability and the financial plumbing of digital trade
The greatest inefficiency in trade today is not the absence of digital systems but their inability to talk to one another. For years, paperless trade has been implemented largely within countries—only for the flow of digital information to stop at the border, forcing traders back to paper for the cross-border leg. Efficiency gains are realized only when trade information moves seamlessly along the entire international supply chain. That requires legal and technical interoperability, robust authentication, recognition of electronically transferable records and adherence to common international standards. The CPTA provides the legal foundation and the intergovernmental platform to develop, test and harmonize digitalization solutions in Asia and the Pacific.
This is where trade facilitation speaks directly to the financial sector. The same digital reforms that streamline customs can also strengthen the financial rails on which trade depends. Trade is financed as much as it is shipped, and the document-related friction that slows goods also slows money. When a bill of lading, a certificate of origin or a phytosanitary certificate can be issued, verified and transferred digitally, settlement accelerates, the scope for fraud and error narrows, and the cost of financing each transaction falls. For banks and supply-chain financiers, interoperable digital trade infrastructure is a precondition for closing the persistent trade-finance gap that disproportionately constrains smaller firms. Digital payment systems complete the picture, particularly for small islands and other economies grappling with the loss of correspondent-banking relationships.
Leaving no trader behind: inclusion, sustainability and resilience
Efficiency must promote inclusion to avoid deepening the very disparities it claims to address. Research on two emerging priorities—trade facilitation for e-commerce and green trade facilitation—is sobering. Measures designed to support micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), women traders and the agricultural sector—the groups most exposed when tariffs rise and value chains contract—continue to lag behind general measures.
The geopolitical moment makes inclusion more urgent. Several of the region’s least developed countries are scheduled to graduate from that status in late 2026, facing the erosion of long-standing trade preferences even as protectionism rises elsewhere. For these economies, diversification of markets and products, deeper engagement in regional arrangements and lower trade costs through digitalization are not competing strategies but a single, coherent response. Green trade facilitation links the efficiency agenda to the region’s climate commitments, ensuring that the transition to more sustainable trade does not become a new barrier for those least able to comply.
The cooperative response to a fragmenting world
It is precisely when the global trading system is under strain that its quieter, more cooperative instruments prove their worth. Tariffs divide; trade facilitation connects. It lowers costs without zero-sum bargaining; it builds the resilience that diversified supply chains require; and, uniquely among trade policies, it delivers gains that are shared along the entire chain. Artificial intelligence and next-generation digitalization now offer the region a chance to accelerate that progress, provided that investments in data, trust, interoperability and inclusion keep pace with the technology.
ESCAP will continue to work alongside member states, the Asian Development Bank, the private sector and partners across the region to advance accession to and implementation of the Framework Agreement on Facilitation of Cross-border Paperless Trade, to strengthen AI readiness and the data foundations it requires, and to ensure that smaller and more vulnerable economies are not left behind.
Source: International Banker
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<p>Time: November 2025<br /> By: WTO and International Trade Group, Legal Department – VCCI</p>
