Policy and performance in customs: Evaluating the trade facilitation agreement

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.