Project Proposal: Draft UN/CEFACT Trade and Transport Facilitation Monitoring Mechanism (TTFMM)

The objective of the project is to create a recommendation and guidelines for designing and implementing a Trade and Transport Facilitation Monitoring Mechanism (TTFMM) that is in charge to create a common methodology to build trade and transport indicators useful to support decision making, and to harmonize efforts in data gathering and promote homogeneity to measure the concepts involved in trade and transport facilitation standardizing the metrics. By creating the metrics and indicators for measuring trade and transport facilitation, it will be also necessary to create the mechanisms to assess and monitor the effectiveness of policies and action plans to facilitate trade. The information that the TTFMM bodies will create information useful for doing comparisons and forecast, but most importantly, it is an extraordinary tool to design strategies, to identify strengths and weakness, to release corrective plans, and enhance policies. A case study repository is also envisaged.

Recommendation 4 suggests that governments establish national trade facilitation bodies (NTFB) for trade facilitation policy formulation and collaboration. It is later complemented by Recommendation 40 which provides approaches and best practices on trade and government consultation for trade facilitation matters. Among other, Recommendations 18, 33, 34 and 35 offer guidelines on several trade facilitation implementation measures. However, sustainable trade facilitation monitoring mechanism has not been fully addressed by the existing recommendations. The new recommendation would cover institutional mechanism and guidelines on monitoring trade and transport facilitation. This recommendation would address the need for establishing the capability of sustainable trade and transport facilitation monitoring mechanism at the national level.