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Policy and performance in customs: Evaluating the trade facilitation agreement
Author(s) -
Hillberry Russell,
Zhang Xiaohui
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
review of international economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.513
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 1467-9396
pISSN - 0965-7576
DOI - 10.1111/roie.12338
Subject(s) - trade facilitation , economics , facilitation , variation (astronomy) , test (biology) , lasso (programming language) , commercial policy , quality (philosophy) , international trade , econometrics , international economics , computer science , paleontology , philosophy , physics , management , epistemology , world wide web , astrophysics , biology
This paper links cross‐country variation in trade facilitation policies to prominent indicators of national customs and logistics performance. We test the hypotheses that the policy data explain variation in the performance indicators, independent of other country characteristics that are plausibly exogenous to changes in trade facilitation policies. We use a LASSO procedure to choose among the many potential explanatory variables in the model. In general we find that country characteristics related to geography, income, and the general quality of governance better explain cross‐country variation in customs and logistics performance than do the measures of trade facilitation policy.