Resource information
The trade facilitation facility (TFF)
was launched to help low-income countries improve their
competitiveness by reducing the costs of engaging in
international trade, thus supporting their efforts to reduce
poverty and achieve the millennium development goals. This
report summarizes the outcomes of the TFF between its
establishment in 2009 and its end in 2015. The report
highlights and reviews the accomplishments and lessons
learned of TFF; it also discusses and reflects the
perspective of task team leaders and relevant World Bank
Group officials on the Bank Group’s continuing work in the
trade facilitation sphere. The report presents results of
TFF-funded activities and programs managed by staff from a
large cross section of Bank Group sectors, including
transport, agriculture, governance (customs), international
trade, and private sector development. The report is
organized as follows: chapter one give introduction. Chapter
two provides an overview of the TFF portfolio. Chapter three
looks at TFF as enabler of deepening regional integration,
highlighting some of the facility’s accomplishments from a
geographic and thematic perspective, particularly the extent
to which TFF complemented Bank infrastructure operations and
nurtured progress on trade facilitation instruments that
countries and regional economic communities (RECs) have
adopted but failed to implement. Chapter four, expanding
thematic insights, addresses conceptual themes in trade
facilitation. Chapter five, conclusions and contributions,
sums up the areas in which TFF has contributed to moving the
regional and multilateral trade facilitation agenda.
