Economic trust infrastructure
Definition
Our economies depend on claims about physical and digital objects that cannot be established by inspection. The systems and arrangements that allow an unrelated party to rely on that verification constitute infrastructure in the same sense as a port or a payment system. The identifiers, credentials, traceability systems, certificates, accreditation, and mutual-recognition arrangements that allow one party to rely on another's claim are economic trust infrastructure.
Trust in identity is named, studied, and institutionally supported. Trust in money is likewise. Trust in objects possesses the same machinery without the same framing.
The cost of unverifiable claims
Failures in the trustworthiness of information tied to objects impose massive costs on the world economy. The World Health Organization estimates that at least one in ten medical products circulating in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified, and that spending on such products runs to approximately USD 30.5 billion each year (WHO, 2024). The consequence is not only wasted expenditure. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime attributes as many as 267,000 deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa to falsified and substandard antimalarial medicines, and up to a further 169,271 to falsified and substandard antibiotics used to treat severe pneumonia in children (UNODC, 2023).
Traded goods show losses of comparable scale. The OECD and the EU Intellectual Property Office estimate global trade in counterfeit and pirated goods at approximately USD 467 billion in 2021, or up to 2.3 percent of global trade (OECD and EUIPO, 2025).
Estimates for food fraud are also striking. Food fraud is estimated to cost the global food industry USD 30 to 40 billion a year (Michigan State University Food Fraud Initiative). The frequency and exact economic impact are hard to establish, because food fraud is designed to avoid detection (FDA, 2026).
Counterfeit wine, 2004 to 2012. Rudy Kurniawan blended inexpensive wines to imitate rare vintages and sold them through leading auction houses to expert collectors who did not detect the substitution. Ordered to forfeit USD 20 million and pay more than USD 28 million in restitution.
US Department of Justice, 2014
Contaminated cough syrups, 2022 to 2023. Syrups adulterated with industrial solvents killed more than 300 children across the Gambia, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, and other countries. The World Health Organization issued three alerts to all 194 member states and described the incidents as systemic.
WHO, 2023
Falsified aircraft engine parts, 2023. A distributor supplied approximately 60,000 engine parts with forged airworthiness certificates. The fraud surfaced only when one engineer asked the manufacturer to confirm a part's origin.
Aerospace Global News, 2026
Horsemeat in the European beef supply, 2013. Horsemeat was found in products labelled as beef across at least 15 EU member states. The passport system intended to track the animals proved open to abuse.
European Parliament, 2013
The economic trust stack
The global economic trust infrastructure is made up of standards, specifications, laws, and other instruments, created by hundreds of organisations. These instruments range from the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model, which sets out how a digital claim is expressed, to ISO/IEC 17065, which sets the requirements a body must meet to certify a product, and from the ICAO passport specification honoured at borders worldwide to Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, which makes a battery passport mandatory in the European Union from February 2027.
Classified by function, these instruments constitute the economic trust stack, a ladder of seven layers running from the identifiers that name an object to the regulation that compels its verification. Each layer relies on those beneath it.
The seven functional layers, as a table
| Layer | Name | Function |
|---|---|---|
| 07 | Mandating regulation | Law that compels verification |
| 06 | Governance and mutual recognition | Arrangements by which one system accepts another |
| 05 | Accreditation | Establishing that verifiers are competent |
| 04 | Conformity assessment and certification | Testing, inspection, and certification |
| 03 | Traceability and exchange protocols | Moving records along a supply chain |
| 02 | Data and credential models | How a claim is expressed |
| 01 | Identifiers | Naming the object |
Where improvement is possible
Interconnection and mutual recognition between the different instruments that make up the world's economic trust infrastructure is a public good, helping to improve the overall system. But, as a public good, this interconnection is underprovided when left to market forces alone. WITO seeks to fill this gap.
Examples where WITO, in collaboration with stakeholders, can build greater beneficial interoperability and mutual recognition are outlined below.
Allowing one examination to serve in many places
An organisation selling into several different markets must satisfy several different standards for the same claim. Recognition between these different standards would let one examination be relied upon in more than one place. The gain is largest for smaller organisations.
CaseAuthorized Economic Operators
Every major market mandates its own system to serialise and trace medicine, all using the same barcode and none accepting another's records. Customs faced the same problem and answered it differently.
Under the World Customs Organization's SAFE Framework of Standards, a national customs administration vets a company against common security criteria and grants it Authorized Economic Operator status. The programme was introduced in 2007 as the WCO's flagship Customs-Business partnership, and the Framework is built on three pillars: customs to customs, customs to business, and customs to other government agencies. Mutual recognition arrangements then let one administration accept another's vetting.
There are 92 operational programmes and 132 concluded arrangements. The examination stays national; the recognition does not. A company vetted once is treated as trusted at both borders, which is precisely what serialised medicine records cannot do.
WCO, August 2026
Extending recognition to where authority is greatest
Mutual recognition is least common among instruments that are authored by governments and legally binding. Often, these standards, regulations, or systems are built for a single legal order. Systems that enable mutual recognition across governments can create meaningful efficiencies.
CaseThe ePassport
India's Aadhaar and Singapore's Singpass cannot establish identity in the other jurisdiction. A passport is more sovereign still, and is trusted at almost any border.
ICAO maintains one specification for electronic machine-readable travel documents, and runs the Public Key Directory, which it describes as "a central repository for exchanging the information required to authenticate electronic Machine Readable Travel Documents". Without it, every state would need a bilateral exchange with every other, which ICAO calls a "highly complex and ineffective system that would be susceptible to errors".
More than 140 states and entities issue ePassports, and 111 take part in the directory. The document is issued by one state and verified by any, because the means of verification is held in common rather than negotiated pair by pair.
ICAO, August 2026
Strengthening the connective layer
There are a relatively small number of instruments that promote interoperability and mutual recognition. Furthermore, this small number of instruments are distributed across many owners. A non-commercial body with no stake in which participant is recognised can serve an important role in coordinating greater connection.
CaseCodex Alimentarius
Food safety shows what a benchmark held in common can do. The Codex Alimentarius Commission publishes international standards covering food additives, veterinary drug and pesticide residues, contaminants, methods of analysis and sampling, and codes of hygienic practice.
Annex A of the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures names those standards as the international reference for food safety, and Article 3.2 attaches a consequence to them: a national measure that conforms to them is "deemed to be necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health, and presumed to be consistent" with the Agreement and with GATT 1994.
A regulator adopting Codex therefore begins from a presumption of compliance rather than having to justify its measure from first principles, and an exporter that meets Codex knows what every member is measuring against. The benchmark is owned by no one country, which is what allows every country to rely on it.
WTO, SPS Agreement Article 3.2 and Annex A paragraph 3
Enabling trust to travel between domains
In many instances, a product's identifier, its conformity certificate, and its verified sustainability claim cannot yet travel together as one trusted record.
CaseOpen Banking
Before 2018 a UK bank customer's account history sat inside each bank's systems, readable by the bank that held it and by nobody else the customer might want to show it to.
Under Open Banking, authorised providers can read account data or initiate payments with the customer's consent, across a common specification. The record follows the person rather than the institution, and the institution is not the party deciding case by case whether to release it.
By March 2025 there were 13.3 million active users served by 145 providers. The data did not become portable because banks agreed to share it. It became portable because a common specification and an authorisation regime made sharing ordinary.
Open Banking Limited, 2025
Designing recognition to be inclusive
A threshold set without care excludes smaller producers and lower-capacity economies. Designing recognition to admit them is a deliberate act, and a test WITO's own arrangements seeks to meet.
CaseCertification stacking in cocoa
A Dominican cocoa cooperative holds roughly eight certifications at once, because the schemes it sells into do not accept one another's audits.
Eight certifications mean eight audits, eight sets of fees, and eight visits, for one cooperative and one crop. Nothing about the cocoa changes between them; what changes is which scheme is asking.
Food safety shows the alternative. The Global Food Safety Initiative benchmarks existing schemes against a common set of requirements and recognises those that meet it, rather than replacing them with a single standard. The duplication ends without the diversity ending, which is the harder and more useful result.
ConfectioneryNews, 2023; GFSI
To learn more about economic trust infrastructure and where improvements are possible, see our publications.