bureaucrats engage in, bribes can affect the deadweight loss, tariff revenue, and the demand for the public service. In particular, corruption seems to reduce significantly demand for the Maputo port, stifling the returns to the massive investments in hard infrastructure of the corridor that have taken place in recent years. Second, policy changes to the organization of ports and to the nature of the interaction between shippers and port officials could reduce corruption. Such changes include reducing the discretion of port officials in the clearance process, and eliminating face-to-face interactions between clearing agents and port officials.

Cantens, Raballand, Bilangna, and Djeuwo (2011) describe a recent pilot for customs reform in Cameroon that involved the introduction of contracts with performance indicators for frontline customs inspectors in two of the country’s customs bureaus (henceforth referred to as treated bureaus). The performance indicators covered both trade facilitation and the fight against fraud and bad practices. Frontline customs inspectors with good performance would be rewarded with non-financial incentives such as congratulatory letters entered into their personnel files, easier access to the director general of customs, training courses, and transfers to more attractive bureaus. Poorly performing inspectors would be sanctioned by eviction from bureaus with strong ―fiscal potential‖ — that is, where the possibilities of earning money legally through disputed claims were high.

This project is an interesting example of a trade intervention that in principle is non-targeted, but where targeting could have been introduced by focusing on a sub-set of frontline customs inspectors. This could then have been an ideal setting to implement an RCT, whereby a subset of randomly chosen frontline inspectors would have been under performance contracts while others would not. However, it was not possible to implement an RCT for several reasons. First, the seven customs bureaus in Cameroon are specialized (oil imports, special customs regimes related to public trends, transit, exports, bulk cargo, and the two treated bureaus) and differ so much in customs practices that it would be difficult to make comparisons across bureaus. Hence, if anything, one would need to take a bureau and split it into a treated group and a control group of frontline inspectors. But this was not feasible given a small sample problem: less than 10 staff work in each bureau. Second, as is generally the case in projects funded by governments or international donors, the time for the pilot project was limited. Thus, it was not possible to overcome the small sample issue by allowing for turnover within each bureau to artificially increase the number of treated and control officers. Moreover, since contract incentives were not financial, time was required to reward good performers (e.g., it would not have been feasible to appoint high-performing inspectors to better positions every six months).

Therefore, the IE of the customs performance contracts project was conducted as a comparison of inspectors’ behavior before and after the project was implemented, without a defined control group, although the impact on clearance times was assessed using the bulk-cargo import bureau 26