Decide

Following assessment of trade facilitation bottlenecks, policy makers and managers must decide on the adoption of appropriate remedial actions, which respond to stakeholders needs and which focus on priority areas. In order to take informed decisions, they should consider the results of all available studies and diagnoses. For each intervention area, it is necessary to identify clear objectives and expected achievements, as well as corresponding indicators and sources of verification to measure results. Key stakeholders will need to be involved in order to obtain a wide constituency for the decisions.
 * Outset **

** Methodology **
 * ** Collect and use information from all available sources to ensure informed decision making: ** When it comes to deciding which facilitation measures to undertake and in which areas (e.g. rationalization of documents and data requirements, automation of processes), receiving information from different perspectives is of key importance. Various ministries and government authorities should be asked for their views, as well as traders and service providers. Structuring and analysing such information will ensure that decisions will be based on actual needs and realities.
 * ** Make use of existing requests, rankings, studies and diagnostics: ** In order to take informed decisions, the results of all available studies and diagnoses should be considered. Examples are the analysis and rankings provided in the Trading Across Borders section of the WB Doing Business Report and in the WB Logistics Performance Index (LPI).
 * ** Clearly identify programme objectives and assess possible impact areas: ** Decision making should always try to be as precise as possible. This also applies to decisions concerning trade facilitation. Policy objectives such as “…increase foreign trade…” are good from a political perspective, but need to be broken down into more immediate objectives for trade facilitation implementers. Therefore the areas to be reformed should be identified as clearly as possible, and such areas should be assessed from the perspective of necessary implementation measures. For instance, if the objective is the adoption of electronic Customs declarations and no means exist to actually manage such declarations, the process will be longer than that for expanding already existing areas; i.e. include more authorities in a Single Window.
 * ** Indicate expected achievements: ** For each intervention area, policy makers and managers need to identify clear and measurable objectives and expected achievements, as well as corresponding indicators and sources of verification to evaluate results. For instance, if the objective is to expand coverage of the national Single Window scheme, the expected achievement will be measured in terms of the number of additional authorities that become part of the scheme.

Tools The European Union has developed a useful [|Guide on Project Cycle Management], which supports good management practices and effective decision making throughout the project management cycle – from programming, through to identification, formulation, implementation and evaluation.