The Economic Trust Landscape
A study of the instruments that create and verify trust in claims about products, services, and people.
Suggested citation · WITO (2026), The Economic Trust Landscape, World Interoperable Trust Organization, Geneva.
Abstract
The economy runs on what we call instruments that comprise the world's economic trust infrastructure: the certificates, identifiers, traceability systems, credentials, and recognition arrangements that allow one party to rely on a claim it cannot examine for itself. This paper maps that infrastructure as a whole, using a purpose-built dataset of the regulations, standards, schemes, treaties, and arrangements that create or verify trust in claims about products, services, and people.
Instruments are classified by function into a stack of seven layers, and by the form they take, who owns them, how binding they are, what drives their adoption, their geographic scope, the problem they address, and whether they participate in mutual recognition. The paper is a descriptive analysis of these instruments.