Ghana

Ever since the World Trade Organization meeting in Singapore in 1996, international trade discussions and negotiations have focused on trade facilitation. Trade facilitation was a key agenda point at the World Trade Organization Summit in Cancún in the fall of 2003. That is just one recent illustration of how trade negotiators see trade facilitation, together with policies that reduce trade barriers, as a powerful way to help countries integrate better into the world economy and thereby enhance their growth prospects.

Singapore's achievements in speeding up trade transactions and linking most members of the trading community by means of a single data network, known as TradeNet, have attracted the attention of a number of observers. Mauritius has replicated Singapore's system, and Ghana has recently moved toward introducing key features of this approach to its own trading community. This chapter briefly describes the origins and achievements of Singapore's TradeNet and what other countries that want to facilitate trade transactions might learn from Singapore's experience. The chapter then turns to Ghana's experience to date, including the results achieved and what Ghana still needs to do to fully capture the benefits that TradeNet has to offer.

The Singapore TradeNet

The Singapore TradeNet links multiple parties involved in external trade, including 34 government units, to a single point of transaction for most trade-related activities, such as clearing customs and paying duties and taxes, processing export and import permits and certificates of origin, and collecting trade statistics. The introduction of this system in 1989 drastically simplified trade transactions (King and Konsunski 1995; United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific 2003). TradeNet's main achievements since 1989 include the following:

* The processing time for cargo clearance was reduced from two to four days to only minutes.

* The number of documents required for cargo clearance fell from a range of 3 to 35, depending on the transaction, to 1.

* The number of trade transactions processed per day rose from 10,000 to 30,000.

* The freight forwarders estimate that their costs of handling trade documentation have fallen by 20 to 35 percent.

* The customs service receives customs duties payments much faster than before.

* The compilation of trade statistics has improved substantially, benefiting both the trading community and the national authorities responsible for trade policy and economic surveillance. ...

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