Enhancing Public Availability of Customs Information
In the Islamic Countries
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where improvement is necessary to meet global best practice, and the report attempts to
identify reforms moving in that direction by studying countries that are at or close to the global
best practice frontier in this area.
The scope for this report is wide. Although there is a focus on the first four articles of the TFA,
given their current salience, the report attempts to address customs and trade information
availability in the broad sense, covering customs documentation and formalities, but also
applicable rules and regulations, and procedures that assist in maintaining trade policy
transparency, such as appeal and review procedures, and advance rulings.
From a methodological standpoint, the report uses a mixed methods approach. First, it uses
descriptive statistics to analyze quantitative data on public information availability, as defined
above, from the OECD and the UN. However, these indicators are necessarily quite coarse, and
so need to be supplemented by qualitative case studies of non-OIC and OIC countries. While the
case studies also make reference to data, they are primarily qualitative in approach, based in
some cases on field work and interviews with key stakeholders.
Section 1 of the report sets out the conceptual framework and methodology. It discusses the
data used, and the approach taken for the interviews and case studies, both those conducted by
desk research and those based on field visits.
Section 2 then moves to a consideration of global trends and good practice, focusing on a review
of the data. The data are analyzed by geographical region and income group, to highlight
differences in performance between groups, but also within groups.
The following section then focuses on OIC countries only. It analyzes the same data as in Section
2, but from the point of view of the three OIC regional groups, and of the individual countries
within those groups. As such, it is the first stage in assessing points of strong and weak
performance within the membership.
The case studies are in Section 4. The section first presents the case studies conducted by desk
reviews, thenmoves to the field visit case studies. The latter are necessarily more detailed, given
the enhanced scope offered by field visits for learning about the various systems in place. The
rationale for choosing the case study countries is set out in this section, and makes clear their
diversity in terms of geography, trade integration, and per capita income level.
Finally, Section 5 concludes the study with a series of findings and discussion points for the
COMCEC Trade Working Group. Recommendations are presented for consideration, not in a
prescriptive sense, but in a spirit of learning from best practice within the organization and
facilitating its dissemination throughout the membership so that all can share in the benefits
that increased information availability—and resultant decreased trade costs—can bring.