Earlier this month in Bali, WTO ministers reached agreement on a set of negotiating issues known as “trade facilitation,” which deal mostly with customs reform and related measures to reduce the time and cost of transporting goods and services across borders. If removing tariffs is akin to turning on a water spigot full blast, trade facilitation is the act of untangling and straightening out the attached hose. A kinked hose impedes the flow as an administratively “thick” border impedes trade.
This paper, which I wrote a few years ago, describes the importance of trade facilitation reforms to economic growth, and explains why subjecting such self-help reforms to negotiation – instead of just undertaking them as a matter of surviving in a competitive global economy – would only delay the process of removing inefficiencies. Five years after the paper was written and 12 years after multilateral negotiations were launched in Doha, a deal was reached obligating governments to reform and streamline their customs procedures, with technical and financial assistance provided by the wealthy to the developing countries.
As I wrote yesterday, this is small relative to the overall Doha Round agenda and relative to what might have been accomplished over these past 12 years in the absence of Doha (i.e., without adhering to the pretensions that our own domestic barriers to foreign commerce are assets to be dispensed with only if foreigners dispense of theirs).
But perhaps nobody has been more gifted at exposing the absurdity of administrative trade barriers with pithy wit and grace than the 19th century French classical liberal business and economics writer Frederic Bastiat. Around 1850, Bastiat made a case for trade facilitation that can scarcely be improved:
Between Paris and Brussels obstacles of many kinds exist. First of all, there is distance, which entails loss of time, and we must either submit to this ourselves, or pay another to submit to it. Then come rivers, marshes, accidents, bad roads, which are so many difficulties to be surmounted. We succeed in building bridges, in forming roads, and making them smoother by pavements, iron rails, etc. But all this is costly, and the commodity must be made to bear the cost. Then there are robbers who infest the roads, and a body of police must be kept up, etc.Now, among these obstacles there is one which we have ourselves set up, and at no little cost, too, between Brussels and Paris. There are men who lie in ambuscade along the frontier, armed to the teeth, and whose business it is to throw difficulties in the way of transporting merchandise from the one country to the other. They are called Customhouse officers, and they act in precisely the same way as ruts and bad roads.
Congratulations, negotiators, for agreeing to remove the kinks from your hoses.
