Enhancing Public Availability of Customs Information
In the Islamic Countries
23
Figure 3: TFIs related to information availability, 2017, by developing region (with Singapore
for reference).
Source: OECD TFIs. Note: excludes high income countries.
The key point to take away from this analysis is the degree to which governments ensure the
public availability of trade and Customs information is generally increasing in per capita country
income: in other words, better off countries tend to be more liberal about the availability of
information. The pattern is not perfect, of course, but it represents the general tendency in the
data. At the same time, however, some developing countries perform extremely well on this
metric. Singapore, a developing country for WTO purposes, is a global leader. But it is not just
Singapore that is in this position: Republic of Korea, another high income East Asia and Pacific
economy, is also a world leader in trade facilitation, including information availability. More
broadly, developing Europe and Central Asia as well as developing East Asia and the Pacific
perform relatively well on information availability, albeit well within the best practice frontier.
As such, this example shows that it is possible for non-high income countries to performwell on
this metric. Of course, difficulties in accessing human and financial resources of course hamper
efforts, as seen in the lower scores of the low income group, and Sub-Saharan Africa. In general,
there is a considerable performance gap between low income countries and other developing
countries, not to mention high income countries, when it comes to the availability of trade and
customs information. This is likely one factor that contributes to higher trade costs in these
countries.
Recent Trends in Performance
To see trends in performance over time, it is informative to compare average scores in 2012
with those in 2017, the latest year for which data are available. To properly deal with the fact
that each group starts from a different baseline, it is appropriate to look at percentage changes
in indicator scores over time. An important caveat to this type of analysis is that the country
sample for the TFIs has changed slightly over time. As a result, changes in score are due both to
changes in the average for countries that appear in the database in all years, and to changes in
composition of the database. Although it would be possible to eliminate the composition effect
0
0,5
1
1,5
2
Information
Availability
Involvement of
the Trade
Community
Advance Rulings
Appeal
Procedures
East Asia & Pacific
Europe & Central Asia
Latin America & Caribbean
Middle East & North Africa
South Asia
Sub-Saharan Africa
Singapore