JSPES, Vol. 47, No. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2022)
pp. 269-307

The Impacts of Trade Facilitation on Vietnam’s Imports and Exports: Evidence from a Gravity Model

Trinh Thi Thu Huong
Foreign Trade University, Vietnam
Nguyen Thanh Tuan
Vietnam Logistics Institute (VLI)
Huong Le
University of Alberta

This paper examines the impacts of trade facilitation on the imports and exports of Vietnam in two periods before and after 2017, when the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) entered into force. To this end, a dataset collected from 84 countries during 2014-2019 is employed to compute trade facilitation indicators (TFIs) and estimate the gravity model. TFIs are computed from 16 dimensions related to trade facilitation (TF) with respective weights based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The gravity model – estimated using instrumental variable (IV) and software environment R version 4.0.4 – demonstrates positive impacts of TF on Vietnam’s import and export. The positive impacts of TF on Vietnam’s import and export after 2017 are larger than that of the previous period. Nevertheless, the model shows that there is no effect of TFA on specific goods, including the top 10 HS (Harmonized Systems) 2-digit codes of Vietnam’s exports and top 5 HS 2-digit codes of Vietnam’s imports (e.g., HS85, HS84, HS09 and HS72.)