**4. Conclusion**

This chapter has analyzed several strategies related to the movement of goods during the Covid-19 pandemic and expressed by international organizations, including ICC, WTO and WCO. Knowing that the pandemic is not likely to end soon, and that automatization may be the path to be followed to pursue a faster and more secure trade exchange, the common idea is to emphasize the usage of new technologies such as blockchain, IoT, machine learning, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and big data.

Although, most countries have already started implementing some or all of them, getting several advantages by their use such as speed control and tracking—as collected in the WCO annual consolidated survey—, there still are several issues to face to have widespread usage. Costs, lack of knowledge, good practices and/or trust, legislation and privacy issues, and lack of governmental strategy and coordination are the one to be faced shortly to ensure an interconnected international customs system.

This chapter focuses only on strategies proposed by international organizations, without acknowledging national responses to the pandemic, and this may represent a limit in the investigation.

Future research directions may be, on the one hand, understanding whether any country would be able to implement the proposed approaches, investing in new technologies for its borders and Customs, and seeing the actual improvements in the relationship among the international trade stakeholders; on the other hand, selecting a specific geographical scope, examining regional and national response to the downshift of international trade and the proposed solutions at a local level.
