CHAPTER 4
Issues and Examples in Conducting a Trade and Transport Facilitation Assessment
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any government and development agencies have implemented the original Trade and Transport Facilitation Assessment (TTFA) toolkit, including the World Bank, which conducted about 50 assessments during 2001–08. These assessments can provide useful insights about the effects that different levels of government participation will have on the assessment or about common challenges in identifying supply chain bottlenecks.
Levels of Government Participation in Implementing Recommendations Since the first edition of this toolkit, a large number of assessments have been initiated by development agencies as a service delivered to the governments of developing countries. Increasingly, assessments are being performed at the request of governments interested in improving the performance of their logistics sector and international supply chains. Governments have responded in a variety of ways to the project components recommended by these assessments. Although the majority of recommended projects should be undertaken by the government, a significant subset requires cooperation between the government and the private sector.1 This was the case in Morocco and Tunisia, where there was a high level of government commitment to improving freight logistics (box 4.1). Results were less substantial in the Central African Republic because of lower levels of government involvement, but the assessment still provided a basis for policy discussion and for development of regional initiatives (box 4.2). Similarly limited government participation characterized the development of a regional project for the Mashreq countries (Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon). In this case, a phase 1 assessment provided the mechanism for starting the dialogue, and also helped to identify common concerns that could serve as the basis for design of the regional project. However, the dynamics of regional trade and the contributions of a regional corridor project would require a second phase of the assessment (box 4.3).
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