OECD Trade Facilitation Indicator (TFI) Structure and Assessment Methods

Many international organizations have carried out their own different trade facilitation related assessments, such as Doing Business – Cross-border Trade and Logistics Performance Index Report by the World Bank, Global Trade Enabling Report and Global Competitiveness Report - Burden of Customs Procedures by the World Economic Forum, and Trade Facilitation Indicator Database by OECD. Among these research works, the trade facilitation assessment conducted by OECD sets a series of 1st-level indicators and 2nd-level indicators which based on the framework of WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement and divided into 3 categories:

1) Import/export trade facilitation indicators;

2) Transit trade facilitation indicators;

3) Additional indicators: procedures of the minimum tax-free limit.

Among them, the import/export TFIs are applicable to most economies, while the transit TFIs only to landlocked countries (regions). Considering the applicable ranges of indicators, for comparable assessment results, OECD only uses the category of import/export TFIs when calculating the average trade facilitation performance of each economy, which including 11 1st-level indicators with subordinate 76 2nd-level indicators (expanded to 155 2nd-level indicators in 2017) so that making deep and multiple-angle trade facilitation research on 163 covered economies possible.

This article is published on webside WCO News.

https://mag.wcoomd.org/magazine/wco-news-87/reviewing-oecd-method/