Trading Costs in East Asia’s Global Value Chains

The WTO’s new Agreement on Trade Facilitation (ATF) will help to reverse the region’s deceleration of overall export growth and, when implemented, could add as much as 3 percent to regional GDP and lift employment across the region by 1.2 percent. In the region’s developing economies, inefficient border and behind-the-border procedures are well above those of the NIEs and far exceed those of the developed economies. Persistent and often growing protectionism has broadly continued as countries have added further measures to their stock of Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs), which now account for as much as 90% of trade costs other than transportation. As such, it defines a new reform agenda for the East Asian economies that could have far-reaching effects on private sector development, especially for small businesses that need greater transparency and simplification of procedures to enable them to more readily access regional and global value chains