A critical component of a country's ability to compete internationally is its capacity to move goods, people, and conveyances across its borders in an efficient, facilitative, and secure manner. In the modern global market, economies can only flourish if their commercial enterprises can import and export without excessive regulations, procedures, costs, and delays. Goods and people in international trade must be able to move safely, and opportunities for exploitation by terrorists and other criminals must be minimized or eliminated.
The Doing Business Trading Across Borders indicators look at the procedural requirements
for exporting and importing a standardized cargo of goods. The indicators consider the number of procedures, time necessary for completion, and cost associated with all of the procedures.
BizCLIR methodology takes the Doing Business' quick glance ten steps further by thoroughly examining why a country is successful (or unsuccessful) at trading across their borders. Not only examining the number of procedures, time, and costs to trade across borders, BizCLIR's tool takes additional steps to be conscious of the whole system as it relates to trade. A team of experts interview stakeholders in government, the private sector, and civil society to understand the process of trading across borders. These areas are evaluated using indicators divided among the four pillars:
- Legal/Regulatory Framework
- Implementing Institutions
- Supporting Institutions
- Social Dynamics
BizCLIR's inclusive investigation allows for a 360-degree view of the current business environment. A qualitative assessment of the entire system helps us understand the reasoning underlying the indicator scores. For example, if costs to trade across borders are extremely high, we can understand that perhaps it was due to poorly written trade laws that do not provide enough regulation, or maybe customs posts are overburdened with security regulations; possibly supporting institutions, such as ports, are backlogged; or maybe it is because women entrepreneurs are inefficiently organized. BizCLIR's analysis provides our clients with distinct advantages by quickly defining the real problems in order to find real solutions.
