Sweden’s Trade Ministry annually organizes an internal seminar bringing together trade officials from the Ministry in Stockholm as well as those based at Swedish embassies all around the world. Hanne Melin, of eBay’s Public Policy Lab, was one of the invited external guests to this year's meeting on 21 – 22 October.
The “Trade Days” covered amongst many topics the EU as a solution to the financial crisis, Corporate Social Responsibility in trade, and the status of the WTO ahead of the Bali Ministerial. Melin participated in a session on the second day, where two panels discussed “the emergence of a new trade policy map” in view of the free trade agreements under negotiation.
The focus of Melin’s contribution was on how the Internet and technology are changing the conditions for world trade, which in turn makes it possible for new actors to enter the world stage and allows for new trade patterns to take shape. Melin stressed that the trend of small businesses serving multiple foreign markets is a global phenomenon: it looks the same across developed, emerging and developing markets as our latest Commerce 3.0 report shows.
Melin also offered her perspective on what this new trade landscape means for trade policy. She argued that we need a holistic approach to trade policy, avoiding silos and artificial segmentation of issues. This is no different from how industry today must offer seamless solutions across online and offline or how commerce is everything from user-friendly mobile check-out to convenient delivery services.
Holistic trade policy would address the needs of each policy actor at each stage of a “trade cycle”: the needs of large corporations, micro businesses and individuals at the stages of observe, orient, decide and act. The suggestion is applying the “Boyd Loop” to trade policy formulation to better cater to the needs of new and different trade actors and to avoid bounded rationality.