Improving Customs Transit Systems
In the Islamic Countries
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that collects, collates, and reports on workflows, outputs, and outcomes21 . 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 chain22.
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 201923 and Logistics Performance Index (LPI)24 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.
Sourcing goods directly at the point of importation – a seaport – is clearly an advantage. On
average, thanks to lower freight costs, retail gasoline price is usually few cents lower in seaports
than in the inland areas of the same country. However, the retail prices are affected by many
additional cost factors in addition to the transport alone, primarily the excise taxes, which in
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