Behind the border trade facilitation in Asia-Pacific: Cost of trade, credit information, contract enforcement and regulatory coherence

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the potential contribution of both trade and non-trade specific business facilitation measures to trade and export competitiveness, as well as the potential gains from adopting a more integrated and coherent approach to trade and business (investment) facilitation. The paper makes several new contributions to the existing body of literature on the impact of behind the border regulations and business environment on trade. For example, by distinguishing between trade and non-trade specific regulatory measures, the analysis provides estimates of how important business regulations typically outside the purview of trade and customs authorities affect trade. The impact of credit information quality – a key to enabling financial institutions to provide efficient trade finance services – on trade flows is quantified for the first time. Most importantly, however, the paper develops a simple way to test for the existence of synergies among trade and business regulations, providing estimates of the importance and additional trade gains associated with achieving a more uniform performance across a wide range of trade and business facilitation areas – suggesting that a country is tackling trade and business (investment) regulations in an integrated manner based on the dynamic identification of weakest links in the trade and business environment.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.