The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international organization working to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The OECD provides a knowledge hub for data and analysis and a unique forum in which governments can work together to share experiences, best practices and seek solutions to common problems.

To help governments improve their border procedures, reduce trade costs, boost trade flows and reap greater benefits from international trade, the OECD has developed a set of Trade Facilitation Indicators (TFIs) that identify areas for action and enable the potential impact of trade facilitation reforms to be assessed: https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/trade-facilitation.html. The indicators cover the full spectrum of border procedures for more than 160 economies across different income levels, geographical regions, and levels of development.

Donor support (i.e. ODA and OOF) for trade facilitation programmes are recorded in the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) under the heading “trade facilitation”. Data are available in ODA Trends and statistics and the Aid for Trade dashboard.

Trade Facilitation Indicators

The data underpinning the OECD TFIs are updated every biennium. The 2024 data series was released in March 2025. The update is accompanied by a Trends Note (OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators: Monitoring Policies up to 2025) highlighting the areas that improved the most and the top reformers across all regions covered, as well as key challenges ahead for trade facilitation reforms. The OECD TFIs data can be accessed through the TFIs Policy Simulator, which allows to discover the key measures driving the performance of a selected economy in a specific indicator and simulate the effects of potential policy reforms on the overall performance. The next update cycle will cover 2026-27.

Analysis of impacts of TF policies

Drawing on the OECD TFIs, the 2025 TFIs Trends Note includes quantitative work that assesses the impacts on reducing trade costs and enhancing trade flows from trade facilitation improvements since the conclusion of the TFA and the expected benefits from further reforms. This analysis shows that as a result of more efficient border processes, trade costs are estimated to have declined by up to 5% over the last decade. The implementation of ambitious reforms could deliver up to 12 percentage points more in trade costs reductions.