OECD

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation (OECD) was established in 1961 as the successor to the OEEC, established in 1947. Its mission is to “promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.” It works on issues related to economic, social and environmental change, including topics such as regulatory reform, development and international trade. The OECD is open for global membership and currently has 34 member countries from Europe, and North and South America. Other countries, in particular, the emerging economies, are partner countries of the OECD.

OECD’s work related to trade facilitation

Through the trade department, the OECD contributes to quantitative economic research on the costs and benefits of trade facilitation, supporting as a so-called Annex D organization the WTO negotiations on trade facilitation.OECD has developed a set of trade facilitation indicators (TFIs) that identify areas for action and enable the potential impact of related reforms to be assessed. The OECD indicators cover the full spectrum of border procedures for more than 160 countries across income levels, geographical regions and development stages. Estimates based on the indicators provide a basis for governments to prioritise trade facilitation actions and to mobilise technical assistance and capacity-building efforts for developing countries in a more targeted way. The TFIs also provide a tool for countries to visualise the state of implementation of various policy areas and measures included in the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement, to monitor their progress since 2012 and to make comparisons with other countries or groups of countries of interest. Two interactive web tools allow users to compare country performance across the 11 trade facilitation indicators, to discover the key measures driving the performance of a selected country, and to simulate the effects of potential policy reforms.