Digital and Sustainable Trade Facilitation in Western Balkans Countries

Abstract

After the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in international economic relations, it became evident that climate-smart aspects should be considered when re-establishing a new international trade order. International organizations have proclaimed that this momentum should be used to include climate-smart trade and investment provisions to enable sustainable development. It has been acknowledged that trade has an important role to play in the global response to climate change, providing economies with tools to draw on in their efforts to mitigate climate change and adapt to its consequences. In this paper, we focus the analysis on investigating the digital and sustainable component of trade facilitation measures applied in Western Balkans countries. To evaluate the importance of trade facilitation measures and their digital and sustainable components we apply the standard gravity model with the data from the UN Global Survey on digital and sustainable trade facilitation. The results show that trade facilitation measures are important for improving and increasing trade among the Western Balkans countries. Especially, measures connected to improving transparency procedures in trade and measures for alleviating trade formalities are most significant for increasing bilateral trade among Western Balkans countries. With a lower level of importance are the measures for improving cross-border paperless trade between these countries.