Abstract:
Countries implement trade facilitation reforms sequentially, yet little is known about whether the order of implementation matters for trade. This paper provides systematic evidence, using the six rounds (2015-2025) of the UN Global Survey on Digital and Sustainable Trade Facilitation - the only global panel tracking the implementation of 38 individual measures in about 180 economies - matched to bilateral and intra-national trade flows. Three findings emerge. First, trade facilitation raises trade: in a structural gravity model with bias-corrected inference, implementation significantly increases international relative to domestic trade, with basic measures - transparency, formalities and institutional arrangements - contributing the largest share. Second, countries have converged on a common reform path: the adoption ordering revealed from the data places basic measures first and cross-border paperless trade last in virtually every country, largely independently of income. Third, timing matters: export gains from digital reforms accumulate over four to six years, and the revealed ordering shows that the digital payoff is larger where basic reforms were already in place. This points to the need for simplification before digitalisation, the sequence practitioners have long advocated. A dynamic-programming exercise over the estimated payoffs, restricted to reform configurations observed in the data, selects the same path - and shows that removing this restriction produces recommendations driven by extrapolation, a cautionary result for estimate-then-optimise policy design across the board.
