Quantifying Apec Trade Liberalization PDF Download

This publication presents two papers that address both trade facilitation and trade liberalization. The first paper, "Achieving the APEC Shanghai Objective: A Methodology to Benchmark and Quantify Trade Facilitation Efforts in Financial Terms", addresses several aspects of trade facilitation. First, it defines trade facilitation for the scope of benchmarking, quantifying, and translating into financial terms the efforts of trade facilitation in APEC. In this context, it addresses the challenge of matching available data to the complexity of what trade facilitation really means in practice and 'takes stock' of available proxies for trade facilitation effort. Then, it briefly discusses the path-breaking methodology of Wilson, Mann and Otsuki (2002) which considers how to create indicators of the different types of trade facilitation effort that are consistent and comparable among the APEC economies. The second paper, "Measuring the Impact of APEC Trade Facilitation: A Gravity Analysis", quantifies the benefits of trade facilitation against tariff reduction. In order to estimate the effect of trade facilitation on trade costs in APEC economies, the authors use the methodology of Wilson, Mann and Otsuki, but implement this methodology using data taken from survey results in APEC in 2002 and the Knowledge-Based Economy (KBE) indicators contained in the 2003 APEC Economic Outlook Report. Using these data, the chapter measures the net trade creation effect of trade facilitation among APEC economies using a gravity-model-based regression analysis. It is notable that similar results to the Wilson, Mann and Otsuki data are obtained, despite very different sources of raw inputs to the constructed trade facilitations indicators.