Trade Facilitation and the Redistribution of Cross-Border Logistics Friction: Evidence from Peru

Background: Single windows, customs risk management, authorized economic operator (AEO) programs and port community systems are expected to lower cross-border logistics friction. Evidence on how much friction they remove is abundant; evidence on where the surviving friction settles, and who absorbs it, is scarce. Peru, with mature facilitation instruments yet weak logistics performance, is the case examined. Methods: Twenty sessions—thirteen institutional interviews and seven roundtables and workshops with border agencies, port, airport, warehouse and postal operators and exporter associations (2611 speaker turns, 137,984 words)—were analyzed through codebook thematic analysis with two coding rounds, a negative-case search and intercoder verification (κ = 0.881 for codability, 0.824 aggregate). Results: Facilitation did not eliminate friction but redistributed it along three coupled pathways: institutional (the digital instrument stops at each agency’s boundary), material (digital coordination runs on nodes whose physical capacity nobody coordinates) and segment-based (trust devices reward operators who already comply). Six node-level mechanisms are documented, and predictability proved codable (κ = 0.712) and concerned decisions more than durations. Conclusions: The Friction Redistribution Framework is proposed as a diagnostic and a set of grounded hypotheses: for each instrument, where residual friction lands, who absorbs it and which indicator would reveal it.