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The evaluation examines the development effectiveness of the World Bank Group's support for trade facilitation and identifies lessons for future engagement. The World Bank Group has played a leading role in trade facilitation reform over the past 12 years, having identified lowering trade costs as a crucial means to promote its development agenda. Among its contributions, the Bank Group has been a leading technical partner to the WTO during the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) process throughout the evaluation period. Main findings of the report include: (i) Over the evaluation period, the World Bank Group has demonstrated leadership in facilitating trade through its broad scope of work: (893 interventions of all types) in addition to Advisory and Analytic work, generally targeting countries with the greatest bottlenecks, results, in its contribution to a substantial reduction of international trade costs, and its creation of global public goods through thought leadership, convening power, and its trade facilitation indicators - which contributed to a positive dynamic in reforms. (ii) Most World Bank Group projects supporting trade facilitation reforms achieved their development objective, and all three institutions exceeded their corporate scorecard targets. The World Bank's investment lending appears to be substantially more effective than its policy operations. At the trade facilitation intervention level, the overall success rate averaged 79 percent.

Infrastructure Investment --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Trade Facilitation --- Trade Policy --- Trade Reform --- Transport --- Transport and Trade Logistics

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This paper studies how productivity and markups respond to non-tariff measures. The analysis uses a novel time-varying data set on all non-tariff measures applied to imported products by Indonesia. Price and quantity information is used to disentangle the impact of non-tariff measures on plants' technical efficiency and markups. The findings show that on average, non-tariff measures generate fewer distortions than import tariffs do. However, while specific non-tariff measures increase the quality of the products on which they are applied, others act as barriers to trade similar to import tariffs. These results suggest that to gauge their impacts and guide policy making, non-tariff measures should not be bundled together in empirical analyses.

Gains From Trade --- International Economics and Trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Non-Tariff Measures --- Price Markup --- Productivity --- Rules of Origin --- Tariffs --- Trade Liberalization --- Trade Policy --- Trade Reform

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Traditional weighted-average measures of trade distortions are widely used in analyzing global and regional reforms, despite well-known deficiencies. This paper develops and applies optimal aggregators for the real-world case of multiple countries and commodities with much more detailed information on trade than on production and consumption. The approach reflects the fact that different aggregators are needed for expenditure on imported goods and for tariff revenues, and allows for incorporation of both intensive and extensive margins of adjustment to reform. Applications confirm that the technique is straightforward enough for widespread use, and point to close to a doubling of the welfare gains at the intensive margin when using the highest possible level of international commodity disaggregation, with larger gains in developing regions than in the industrial countries. The measured income gains increase along the entire path of liberalization, with slightly larger increases in the earlier stages, where the gaps between the responses of the expenditure and tariff revenue aggregators are largest. Sensitivity analysis suggests that, for global trade reform, the ease of substitution between tariff lines is much more important than that between varieties from different countries.

Aggregation --- Agriculture --- Debt Markets --- Distortions --- Economic Theory & Research --- Economic Welfare Measurement --- Free Trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Rural development --- Trade Policy --- Trade Reform --- Trade Restrictiveness

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Lao PDR's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth will remain robust in 2011 with projected growth of 8.6 percent compared to 8.4 percent in 2010. Natural resources and manufacturing sectors are expected to drive growth this year. The expected growth in the garment exports (by about 15-20 percent in this year) follows the European Union (EU) relaxation in raw material sourcing requirement and increased orders by key garment producers. The service sector also shows signs of improvement, particularly in transport, tourism (hotels and restaurants) and retail trading. Agriculture (fishery, livestock and crops) is expected to benefit from the recent increase in regional demand and higher food prices. Out of 8.6 percent growth in 2011, about 3.6 percentage points come from the resource sectors, about 1 percentage point each from manufacturing and agriculture, 0.5 percentage points from construction and 2.5 percentage points from services. Although overall trade balance is expected to improve the current account deficit is expected to widen slightly too about 9.4 percent of GDP in 2011 from about 8.6 percent in 2010 mainly on the account of larger transfers of profits and debt service payments abroad by large resource projects. Thus, resource current account surplus is expected to decrease to 4.8 percent of GDP in this year from about 5.5 percent in 2010.

Analysis of Economic Growth --- Commodity Prices --- Economic Growth --- Economic Management --- Fiscal & Monetary Policy --- Macroeconomic Management --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Public Sector Development --- Public Sector Management and Reform --- Royalties --- Trade Liberalization --- Trade Reform --- World Trade Organization

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TRIST is a simple, easy to use tool to assess the adjustment implications of trade reform. It improves on existing tools. First, it is an improvement in terms of accuracy because projections are based on revenues actually collected at the tariff line level rather than simply applying statutory rates. Second, it is transparent and open; runs in Excel, with formulas and calculation steps visible to the user; and is open-source and users are free to change, extend, or improve according to their needs. Third, TRIST has greater policy relevance because it projects the impact of tariff reform on total fiscal revenue (including VAT and excise) and results are broken down to the product level so that sensitive products or sectors can be identified. And fourth, the tool is flexible and can incorporate tariff liberalization scenarios involving any group of trading partners and any schedules of products. This paper describes the TRIST tool and provides a range of examples that demonstrate the insights that the tool can provide to policy makers on the adjustment impacts of reducing tariffs.

Currencies and Exchange Rates --- Customs --- Customs duties --- Debt Markets --- Developing countries --- Domestic production --- Economic Theory and Research --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Free Trade --- Free trade --- Import regimes --- Imports --- International Economics & Trade --- International trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Multilateral trade reform --- Public Sector Development --- Regional trade agreements --- Tariff exemptions --- Tariff line --- Tariff reform --- Trade diversion --- Trade model --- Trade policy --- Trade policy reform --- Trade reform --- Trade reforms --- Trade regime