About a year ago, as part of its Community of Practice Series on Trade Facilitation for the Caribbean Region, the Inter-American Development Bank invited me to speak about whether it was possible to reconcile the competing forces of Customs Compliance and Trade Facilitation.

To prove my thesis that current compliance and facilitation initiatives are incompatible, I plotted U.S. customs compliance and trade facilitation initiatives over a graph of duty losses from 2003 to 2014. The results were stark…

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