Digitalization of Customs Control between Trade Facilitation and Security: A Literature Review

Abstract

Over the past decades, digital transformation has become a strategic imperative for customs administrations, which must reconcile a historical paradox between border security, revenue collection and trade fluidity. While the literature extensively documents the technologies involved, it remains fragmented across economic, technical and behavioural perspectives that are rarely articulated within an integrative framework; it is this gap that the present article seeks to address. Based on a corpus of peer-reviewed articles and institutional reports published between 2000 and 2025 and analysed along four interdisciplinary axes, this literature review structures the state of the art around three tensions, namely an economic tension (fluidity versus control rigor), a technological tension (disruptive innovation versus data quality debt) and a cognitive tension (algorithmic automation versus human responsibility). The retained corpus of forty-eight sources is distributed across the economic tension (18 sources), the technological tension (16 sources), the cognitive tension (10 sources) and cross-cutting references (4 sources).

The findings highlight a convergence towards machine learning and active learning methods for risk targeting, while revealing a systemic imbalance, as the effectiveness of predictive models remains dependent on often inadequate Data Quality Management (DQM) and faces the requirement of Explainable AI (XAI). The article proposes a conceptual framework linking theories, tensions, mechanisms and outcomes, and offers recommendations for a hybrid governance of data.

JEL Classification : F13 ; H83 ; O33 ; D73.

Paper type : Literature review.