Customers everywhere are complaining about empty shelves, while retailers explain that supply chains are tangled or broken. Yet there are ways that government and private sector could work together to improve the situation. For example, by making cross-border trade simpler by reducing the paperwork that traders must submit to different government agencies to be allowed to import and export goods.
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development(UNCTAD), the average international trade transaction involves anywhere from 20 to 30 different parties, 40 documents, 200 data elements (30 of which are repeated at least 30 times) and the re-keying of 60–70% of all data at least once. It is hard to find any other government service that requires such a vast amount of paperwork.
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