Connectivity, Logistics & Trade Facilitation
Facilitating Trade At The Border, Behind The Border, And Beyond
The modern era of international trade is one of increasingly complex interactions between
people, firms, and organizations. Supply chains cross countries and regions. Trade has become a
24/7 business and good performance in trade requires connectivity along not only roads, rail, and
sea, but in telecommunications, financial markets and information-processing. Having inefficient or
inadequate systems of transportation, logistics, and trade-related infrastructure can severely impede
a country’s ability to compete on a global scale.
This increasing complexity has serious implications for the world’s poor, who often are
disproportionately disconnected from global, regional or even local markets. Poverty is often
concentrated in geographic areas that are poorly connected to active economic centers, within and
between countries. These pockets of poverty may be close to dynamic, urban markets, for example,
but economically isolated from them. They often lack good connections to financial, economic,
information, and infrastructure networks, too. Firms and communities in these areas miss
opportunities to develop skilled, competitive workforces; they are not integrated in global
production chains and are less able to diversify their products and skills.
In line with twin goals of eradicating extreme poverty and increasing shared prosperity, experts
in the World Bank Group work with developing country policymakers and private sector leaders to
increase connectivity and facilitate trade. Developing countries -- especially those that are
landlocked -- face considerable challenges when it comes to tackling trade facilitation issues.
Recognizing this, the World Bank Group invests heavily in connectivity, logistics and trade
facilitation.
Supply chain connectivity and logistics
Making it easier for firms and people to access opportunities, markets, and supply-chains is
fundamental in today’s trade environment. Connectivity encompasses physical facilities, services,
and ways to facilitate the movement of goods and people within and across borders regardless of
their relative position within a network, e.g. hub or feeder, central or remote. The connectivity of
one economy depends on the connectivity of all its partners. Understanding how well or how limited
connectivity requires information about trade costs and economic distance, which reflect the
average cost to access markets as a buyer or supplier. The unit of analysis can vary: networks can be
global, regional, or sub-national. Connectivity links trade with transportation, entrepreneurship, and
territorial development.
The World Bank Group is a leader in connectivity and logistics performance evaluation, and in
customs and border control, a key piece of trade facilitation.
Customs and Border Management
The World Bank Group has been an active supporter of customs reform and border
management modernization for many years. The Bank Group has invested in more than 120 projects
to improve border agency challenges over the past 20 years. The current trade portfolio includes
approximately $300 million in border-related operations and technical assistance programs.
The World Bank Group’s projects include the application of technological solutions to support
increased transparency and efficiency and to support collaborative border management
approaches. Work on this agenda is spread across all regions with customs and border management
specialists providing advice and project implementation support as well as practical toolkits and
knowledge products. The World Bank Group is strongly engaged in supporting the implementation
of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement and the adoption of other
international standards.
Among the issues covered by our work are:
Trade infrastructure investments, especially along major routes
Logistics and transport services
Regional trade facilitation and trade corridors
Transit and multimodal transport
Customs and border management
Port efficiency
World Bank experts have developed a range of reports and toolkits for practitioners and
policymakers to support improvements in countries’ global trade connectivity, logistics performance,
as well as customs and border management.
The products include a dataset that provides a comprehensive cross-country benchmark for
logistics performance, a diagnostic toolkit for trade and transport facilitation, a toolkit to assess
logistics competencies and skills, and a series of handbooks that tackle the issue of streamlining
customs and border clearance procedures through comprehensive border management reform.
Datasets, Toolkits and Reports
1. Datasets
The 2018 Logistics Performance Index (LPI) Report and Database
The Logistics Performance Index (LPI) measures how well countries connect to international
logistics networks. It helps countries identify ways to improve their trade logistics performance.
Based on a worldwide survey of operators on the groundsuch as global freight forwarders and
express carriersthe LPI provides in-depth knowledge and feedback on the logistics “friendliness” of
the countries in which the operators do business and those with which they trade.
2. Toolkits
Trade and Transport Facilitation Audit (TTFA)
Trade facilitation and logistics have become an important policy area in development. Supply
chain constraints are now recognized as a major impediment to export led growth. The Trade and
Transport Facilitation Assessment (TTFA) is a practical tool to identify the obstacles to the fluidity of
trade supply chains. Taking the perspective of service delivery to traders, the TTFA assessment is
founded on facts and data collected through a series of meetings and interviews with the main
public and private participants to these international supply chains. They include customs and other
border agencies, transport regulators, freight forwarders, transport operators, ports, and others. The
toolkit helps design plans of action to improve logistics performance among its three main
dimensions: infrastructure, services, and procedures and processes. This new edition of the toolkit
provides an opportunity not only to reflect the changes in the trade environment and the need for
additional features in the toolkit, but also to benefit from the experiences of the assessments
already undertaken based on the original edition. In 2001, the Bank issued a first TTFA toolkit based
on an original concept developed by John Raven. This initial concept was extensively revised to give
the new toolkit an increased operational focus. The semantic change from audit to assessment also
reflects the expansion in scope and the emphasis on development of implementable actions beyond
the initial diagnosis.
