Do managers and experts agree? A comparison of alternative sources of trade facilitation data

Working paper

This paper constructs country-level aggregates of trade facilitation measures from firm-level responses in the Enterprise Surveys and compares them with the Doing Business indicators, the Logistics Performance Index and the Enabling Trade Index. Correlations between the data sources are low even for very specific and similar questions. We also use the Enterprise Surveys to distinguish between within-country inter-firm variation and between-country variation, finding that the latter accounts for only a quarter of the total. For the purposes of identifying where reform is needed and estimating the relationship between trade facilitation and exports, these findings raise the issue of which form of variation is more informative and which data source is more reliable.

Authors: Behar, A

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: University of Oxford
• Series: Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
• Publication date: 2010-08-01
• Paper number: 503
• Keywords: trade facilitations; enterprise surveys; gravity models; doing business; logistics performance index; enabling trade index; firm heterogeneity