Query: Trade facilitation

title: The Trade Facilitation Impact of the Chinese Diaspora
abstract: Using an enhanced data set on the population share of overseas Chinese in 1970 and 1990, this paper analyses the impact of the Chinese diaspora on facilitating China's bilateral trade during the period 1973&#8211;2013. Our findings suggest substantial trade creation effects resulting from the presence of ethnic Chinese in the trade partner population. Diaspora impacts on Chinese bilateral imports are in general higher than those found for exports. Coethnic networks play a larger role as long as the partner country does not have an RTA with China in place. Among export sectors, effects found were strongest for food, as well as for machinery and transport equipment. In regard to imports, coethnic networks matter mostly for raw materials, machinery and transport equipment, and chemicals.

title: Trade Facilitation Framework for E commerce Platforms using Blockchain

title: The impacts of liberalization and trade facilitation on economic performance, poverty and income inequality: An analytical study
abstract: This study examines the impacts of import duty and trade transaction cost reductions on economic performance, poverty, and income distribution inequality, through the top down computable general equilibrium approach.  It reveals that reducing import duty in agricultural decreases urban poverty but increases the poverty incidence at the rural and national levels. Reducing import duty in agricultural industry lowers urban and national poverty without affecting rural poverty. Meanwhile, the reductions of both import duty and transaction costs bring down the poverty incidence at all levels urban, rural, and national. The inequality in rural and national income distribution increased due to the cuttings of import duty in agricultural and agricultural industry. However, it declined due to the reduction of transaction costs, and the combined transaction cost with import duty in agricultural or agricultural industry.

title: Logistics performance as a mediator of the relationship between trade facilitation and international trade: A mediation analysis
abstract: The growing volume of international trade, the disappearance of borders between countries and the expansion of the concept of globalisation have recently made the logistics sector more important in world trade. Today, logistics has emerged as one of the largest and most dynamic activities in the world. Unfortunately, the logistics gap between rich and poor countries persists. According to the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) high income countries dominate the logistics ranking, while the worst performers are underdeveloped economies that are often landlocked countries, small island states or post conflict countries. However, logistics performance is not merely determined by the level of per capita income, as many countries perform better than others in different income groups. When talking about logistics performance, Gani (2017) refers to the processes necessary for the safe and secure transport of goods from one country to another. Underdeveloped and developing countries, therefore, need practical trade logistics measures to facilitate trade in order to change import and export processes and optimise the supply chain without having to commit to significant additional human and financial resources.

title: The African Continental Free Trade Area and the trade facilitation agreement: some regional macroeconomic impacts

title: ROADS TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE AND TRADE FACILITATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: THE MONTE CARLO SIMULATION APPROACH
abstract: Trade facilitation is effectively linked to the capacity of existing transport infrastructure. Therefore, the development of transport related infrastructure plays a pivotal role in ensuring that this policy is fully implemented. The primary objective of this current study is to empirically examine the extreme effects of roads transport infrastructure on the implementation of trade facilitation policy (trade simplification and harmonization) in South Africa. This follows the fact that almost 90 per cent of cargo in South Africa and other SADC countries is transported using roads transport. The Threshold Vector Error Correction Model (TVECM) is adopted in this current study to estimate nonlinear effects of roads transport infrastructure on trade facilitation policy. Moreover, this study employs the Ali Mikhail Haq copulas and uses the residuals of the TVECM to predict the extreme dependence between roads transport infrastructure and trade facilitation. The results obtained in this study discovered that an estimated TVECM (1) was a good framework for interpreting the co movement of roads transport infrastructure and trade facilitation in South Africa. The study concluded that roads transport infrastructure has extreme effects on trade facilitation since the correlation margins of the variables are extremely tight. Therefore, without proper roads transport infrastructure in place, trade simplification and harmonization as stipulated in the trade facilitation policy will remain a challenge in South Africa. This will also have a detrimental effects on imports and exports of South Africa since trading will continue to be time consuming and costly.

title: Investment Facilitation and Mode 3 Trade in Services: Are Current Discussions Addressing the Key Issues
abstract: Based on a novel approach to measuring the cost of trade in services for Modes 1 (cross border supply) 2 (consumption abroad) and 4 (temporary movement of service suppliers) developed by the World Trade Organization Secretariat, this pper reviews available evidence on factors affecting trade costs for services supplied via a commercial presence in a host country market, so called Mode 3 trade. It does so with a view to answering the question of whether the current "facilitation" agendas on services and investment proceeding at the World Trade Organization focus on the most important factors affecting Mode 3 related trade costs, by far the most important of all modes of supplying services internationally. The paper explores the policy opportunity costs arising from the decision to focus the investment facilitation agenda on matters of regulatory transparency and the streamlining of administrative procedures. It recalls how reducing regulatory heterogeneity, tackling discriminatory impediments to cross border investment, and developing investor state conflict management mechanisms to retain and expand investment and prevent dispute escalation all issues left unaddressed by ongoing negotiations hold important potential for reducing Mode 3 trade costs and facilitating expanded investment.

title: The Trade Off of Virtual Reality Training for Dart Throwing: A Facilitation of Perceptual Motor Learning With a Detriment to Performance
abstract: Advancements in virtual reality (VR) technology now allow for the creation of highly immersive virtual environments and for systems to be commercially available at an affordable price. Despite increased availability, this access does not ensure that VR is appropriate for training for all motor skills. Before the implementation of VR for training sport related skills takes place, it must first be established whether VR utilization is appropriate. To this end, it is crucial to better understand the mechanisms that drive learning in these new environments which will allow for optimization of VR to best facilitate transfer of learned skills to the real world. In this study we sought to examine how a skill acquired in VR compares to one acquired in the real world (RW) utilizing training to complete a dart throwing task in either a virtual or real environment. We adopted a perceptual motor approach in this study, employing measures of task performance (i.e. accuracy) as well as of perception (i.e. visual symptoms and oculomotor behavior) and motor behaviors (i.e. throwing kinematics and coordination) Critically, the VR trained group performed significantly worse in terms of throwing accuracy compared to both the RW trained group and their own baseline performance. In terms of perception, the VR trained group reported greater acute visual symptoms compared to the RW trained group, though oculomotor behaviors were largely the same across groups. In terms of motor behaviors, the VR trained group exhibited different dart throwing kinematics during training, but in the follow up test adapted their throwing pattern to one similar to the RW trained group. In total, VR training impaired real world task performance, suggesting that virtual environments may offer different learning constraints compared to the real world. These results thus emphasize the need to better understand how some elements of virtual learning environments detract from transfer of an acquired sport skill to the real world. Additional work is warranted to further understand how perceptual motor behaviors are acquired differently in virtual spaces.

title: Multifunctionality of biocrusts is positively predicted by network topologies consistent with interspecies facilitation
abstract: The potential of biodiversity loss to impair the delivery of ecosystem services has motived ecologists to better understand the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Although increasing evidence underlines the collective contribution of different biodiversity components on the simultaneous performance of multiple functions (multifunctionality) we know little about the trade offs between individual diversity effects and the extent to which they determine multifunctionality differentially. Here, at a subcontinental scale of 62 dryland sites, we show in phototrophic microbiota of biological soil crusts (biocrusts) that, whereas richness alone is unable to guarantee the maxima of multifunctional performance, interspecies facilitation and compositional identity are particularly stronger but often neglected predictors. The inconsistent effects of different biodiversity components imply that soil multifunctionality can be lost despite certain species remaining present. Moreover, we reveal a significant empirical association between species functional importance and its topological feature in co occurrence networks, indicating a functional signal of species interaction. Nevertheless, abundant species tend to isolate and merely interact within small topological structures, but rare species were tightly connected in complicated network modules. Our findings suggest that abundant and rare species of soil phototrophs exhibit distinct functional relevance. These results give a comprehensive view of how soil constructive species drive multifunctionality in biocrusts and ultimately promote a deeper understanding of the consequences of biodiversity loss in real world ecosystems.

title: The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects
abstract: The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement will create the largest single market in the world encompassing 55 nations, 1.3 billion people and an economic area with a GDP valued at $3.4 trillion. This paper quantifies the long term economic and distributional implications of the AfCFTA using a global computable general equilibrium model (CGE) and a microsimulation framework. The analysis goes beyond previous studies that have largely focused on tariff and nontariff barriers in goods by including the effects of services and trade facilitation measures, as well as distributional impacts on poverty, employment, and wages of female and male workers. Simulation results suggest that the agreement could double intra regional trade, increase real income in AfCFTA countries by 7 and lift 30 million people in the continent from extreme poverty. In addition, the agreement would increase employment opportunities and wages for unskilled workers and help to close the wage gap between men and women. While on aggregate, distributional outcomes improve, some countries can experience a worsening of the wage gap faced by unskilled, female and young workers indicating the importance of complementary policy reforms.