Improved trade facilitation boosts competitiveness, encourages investment, stimulates increased diversification, reduces corrupt practices, and creates sustainable jobs for men and women by increasing access to regional and global markets. Increased trade coupled with stronger linkages to regional and global value chains (GVC), and the adoption of digital technologies creates better jobs for women, young entrepreneurs, and other marginalized communities who can do well on the more level playing field of digitally supported export-oriented markets.
We implement trade facilitation through a multi-disciplinary approach across multiple government agencies in close cooperation with the private sector and civil society, with whom feedback loops and public-private dialogue can create feedback loops for the private sector to communicate trade barriers and for government to communicate trade reforms. Trade-related transactions costs are incurred at the border and behind the border. Our approach involves streamlining border processes to focus on trade facilitation rather than revenue collection, which paves the way for increasing DRM though stimulating increased trade and investment. Reducing the regulatory burden through implementing regulatory good practices and building trade capacity encourages investment and job creation. We view global and regional treaty commitments such as the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) as an important starting point for technical assistance efforts since they identify specific trade facilitation reforms to which a country has formally committed and now needs to implement, often through a TFA-mandated inter-agency national committee on trade facilitation.
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