Improving Customs Transit Systems

In the Islamic Countries

“performance measurement” usually refers to the continuous gathering of data from specific

functional areas. It is the ongoing monitoring and reporting of a Customs administration’s

progress towards reaching its organizational goals. The Customs develops an internal system

that collects, collates, and reports on workflows, outputs, and outcomes

. The WCO Time

Release Study Guide can help countries to identify key problems in their national CTR. TRS is a

tool and method for measuring the actual performance related to trade facilitation at the border.

According to the guide - TRS measures the total time needed to complete all formalities. In other

words, it can determine with precision the time for each separate procedure, such as the average

time needed to prepare documents and to complete the formalities for each stakeholder

responsible, and other average times in the movement of cargo between two or more countries

along the international supply chain

1.8

Benefits of efficient CTRs

CTR is more problematic for landlocked countries because the goods coming to these countries

will need to pass more transit countries compared with maritime countries. According to data

from World Bank Doing Business 2019

and Logistics Performance Index (LPI)

for 2018, the

average trade across border score and average LPI score give different results for landlocked

and maritime countries

. Unexpectedly, landlocked countries have higher score when

it comes to trading across the border. While the average time to import is higher than that of

maritime countries, their own costs to import regarding border compliance is much less than

the same costs for maritime countries. In such a way, most of the landlocked countries try to

buffer the downside of being landlocked by improving the efficiency of their own BCPs. On the

other side, the average LPI score confirms the results of many other studies that landlocked

countries have more challenges with when it comes to customs transit procedures before the

goods come to the destination.

The data also shows that being landlocked is not the only factor that impacts these scores. Many

maritime countries have poor CTR, while there are also landlocked countries like Switzerland

with 91.79 tradings across border score and 3.9 scores of LPI and Austria with 100 scores of

trading across border and 4.03. Austria is part of the EU common transit system, which means

they use one of the most advanced CTR. Although Switzerland is not an EU Member State, it is

an EFTA member as well as a full participant in the NCTS, so the transit of goods between the

EU and Switzerland is very efficient.