• Specific Initiatives. WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA): What is the gap between countries’ current statuses and those to be reached according to the commitments in the TFA? Are there national road maps for fulfilling these commitments? Risk Management: How prevalent is risk management among border agencies? How do they perform their risk analysis? Which criteria are used to allocate shipments to the different verification channels? Do these criteria differ for export, imports, and transit? How? What is the share of import and export declarations that undergo physical inspections? Authorized Economic Operators (AEO): What are the eligibility criteria for these programs? How many and what kinds of firms are AEO-certified? What is the share of trade covered by AEO programs? How many mutual recognition agreements were signed? Single Windows (SW): Which countries have a trade SW in place? How have these SW been implemented? Are trade SW comprehensive in terms of relevant agencies and procedures? Transit Trade and Simplified Trade Regimes: What are the best practices regarding transit schemes? Who are the users of simplified export/import regimes?

• Impacts. How much can we expect trade costs to decline as a result of the TFA? Are there complementary measures that would leverage its implementation? What would be the impact of the implementation of the TFA on world trade and specific regions and/or countries? How do delays associated with administrative processes affect firms’ and thereby their countries’ trade? What are the channels through which these effects arise? What are the mechanisms behind these impacts? Do the effects vary across firms, products, and destinations? How do trade facilitation measures interact with other trade and infrastructure policies in shaping trade outcomes? Do harmonization, coordination, and mutual recognition among countries make a difference? To what extent trade facilitation results inchanges in employment and productivity? 

• Political Economy Issues. What are the institutional challenges faced in implementing the TFA? What kind of and how much technical assistance efforts would be needed to implement it? Is technical assistance enough? Should other investments be considered? What type of investment? What are the obstacles to reform customs and other border agencies and what are those to design and implement trade facilitation initiatives such as single windows and integrated transit systems? How can these obstacles be overcome? How do stakeholders participate and interact in this area? Under which conditions interagency cooperation and coordination is more likely to occur? What role can the private sector play?

• Institutions and procedures. Institutions: How many and what agencies are involved in the administrative processing of trade flows between countries? How are these agencies organized? What are their budgets and number of employees? How do they allocate resources across areas and programs? What practices do border agencies follow to recruit, remunerate, and promote personnel? How stringent are their ethic codes? Procedures: How do agencies’ procedures look like? Are these procedures coordinated with each other? Are their information systems interconnected? How long does it take to complete the procedures? Do these procedures and their completion times vary across entry/exit points, firms, products, or destinations? Why?

Both theoretical and empirical contributions will be considered, but in all cases priority will be given to papers identifying and shedding light on relevant policy questions such as those outlined above, including case studies of policies followed by national or international organizations, in particular. Furthermore, submission of papers that, in doing this, explicitly contrast successful and failed cases, comparing countries within a certain a geographical area, is strongly encouraged. Important lessons are expected to be drawn from these contributions for Latin American and Caribbean countries.
 

All researchers who are associated with a European or Latin American/Caribbean based academic or research institution are eligible to submit papers. While detailed abstracts will be accepted, there is a strong preference for nearly completed papers. Submission should be accompanied by a statement declaring the institutional affiliation of the authors. The papers should be written in English.

CALENDAR:

• The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2015.
• The final selection of papers will be made by June 10, 2015 by the network coordinators. More
• The final versions of the papers must be delivered by September 20, 2015.
• The selected papers will be presented along invited contributions at the XIII Annual ELSNIT Conference that will be hosted by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, in Kiel, Germany on October 23 -24, 2015.

LOGISTIC INFORMATION:

The selected authors’ and invited discussants’ travel expenditures (economy class) and per diems to participate at the conference will be reimbursed by the IDB. Detailed guidelines explaining the logistics of the conference will be provided at a later stage. Please circulate this call for papers among your colleagues and other potentially interested parties.

REGISTRATION AND SUBMISSION OF PAPERS:

If you are interested in participating, please fill out the form online .