Facilitating trading across borders

Nazery Khalid discusses trade across borders and the need to measure its efficiency to facilitate rising global trade volumes

In today’s globalised and liberalised world, more countries depend on trade to power their economic growth. Trade has enabled people across the world to have access to numerous goods and materials at cheaper cost, for enterprises to prosper and for nations to uplift the socio-economic lot of their citizens. Although global trade has been sluggish since the economic downturn began in 2008 and, as emerging economies – especially China – record slower economic growth, global trade volume is still increasing albeit at a slow pace of 2.5 per cent. This was below the global economic growth of 3.1 per cent in 2015, as reported by World Bank, which paints a morose picture for the world economy.