Grow With the Flow

Abstract

The evaluation examines the development effectiveness of the World Bank Group’s support for trade facilitation and identifies lessons for future engagement. The World Bank Group has played a leading role in trade facilitation reform over the past 12 years, having identified lowering trade costs as a crucial means to promote its development agenda. Among its contributions, the Bank Group has been a leading technical partner to the WTO during the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) process throughout the evaluation period. Main findings of the report include: (i) Over the evaluation period, the World Bank Group has demonstrated leadership in facilitating trade through its broad scope of work: (893 interventions of all types) in addition to Advisory and Analytic work, generally targeting countries with the greatest bottlenecks, results, in its contribution to a substantial reduction of international trade costs, and its creation of global public goods through thought leadership, convening power, and its trade facilitation indicators - which contributed to a positive dynamic in reforms. (ii) Most World Bank Group projects supporting trade facilitation reforms achieved their development objective, and all three institutions exceeded their corporate scorecard targets. The World Bank’s investment lending appears to be substantially more effective than its policy operations. At the trade facilitation intervention level, the overall success rate averaged 79 percent.