Enhancing Public Availability of Customs Information
In the Islamic Countries
21
for interested parties and advance notice of changes. Similarly, chapters on customs
administration frequently address customs procedures, including some of the aspects
considered here. As the case of Morocco in Section 4 demonstrates, an RTA with a partner
committed to transparency—the USA in this case—can provide an external anchor to domestic
reforms that ultimately increase the transparency of the trading environment, including through
improved commitments to the public availability of customs and trade-related information.
There is no comprehensive data source available on the transparency provisions of RTAs. It is
therefore not possible to address this issue systematically in this section. However, its potential
importance for countries engaged in agreements with regional or distant partners is noted. As
withWCO instruments, country involvement in these kinds of measures means that it is typically
easier to move towards the paradigm of the TFA’s provisions on information availability, as part
of the work has already been done. Indeed, there is evidence fromother areas that when it comes
to regulatory reforms in trade agreements, the de facto effect is often to change policies affecting
all countries, not just RTA partners, because it is so difficult in a regulatory sense to discriminate
in favor of particular partners.14
2.2. Trade Facilitation Indicators
Based on the above discussion, this subsection looks at the performance of developing countries
in terms of public availability of customs and trade information. The data source is the OECD
TFIs. As noted above, there are primarily four aggregate indicators (pillars) that are of
relevance:
 Information availability.
 Involvement of the trade community.
 Advance rulings.
 Appeal procedures.
Each pillar is made up of a set of detailed indicators, but OECD does not release quantitative data
at that level of disaggregation. It is therefore necessary to work at the level of these pillars, which
essentially reflect the broad contents of the first four articles of the TFA.
The discussion first looks at the current state of play in relation to information availability,
focusing on the latest available data. It then turns to a consideration of recent trends, to identify
the direction and extent of changes over time.
Current State of Play
As noted above, there are four aggregate measures in the TFIs that are of particular interest
here. presents the data for each of the four pillars by income group, with the high
income group and Singapore included as best practice reference points. As is clear from the
figure, Singapore scores close to the maximum possible two on each pillar, which means that the
relevant provisions are fully implemented, or close to being fully implemented. (For reference,
an intermediate score of one means that a measure is partially implemented, while zero
indicates it is not implemented). Performance is variable within the other income groups. In
14 Miroudot, S., and B. Shepherd. 2014. “The Paradox of ‘Preferences’: Regional Trade Agreements and Trade
Costs in Services.” The World Economy, 37(12): 1751-1772.