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Trade and transport facilitation assessment : a practical toolkit for country implementation
The Trade and Transport Facilitation audit toolkit provides a simple and cost-effective instrument to analyze bottlenecks in international supply chains and to prepare corrective measures. Its key insight is that considerable knowledge can be easily obtained by interviewing key participants in the commercial or procedural transactions that combine to form international supply chains. These participants include private service providers such as freight forwarders, exporters, transporters and bankers as well as public agencies such as customs, port authorities, and transport regulators. The first chapters introduce the conceptual framework and some of the reasons for conducting an audit. The third describes the implementation of the audit including planning and scheduling, resource requirements and organization of the analysis and preparation of the reports. The annexes provide additional information on the concept, the methodology and content of the audit. The Interview Guides provides the scope for the meetings and checklists for all categories of interviewees and field visits.
Book
Trade and transport facilitation assessment : a practical toolkit for country implementation
Achieving practical trade facilitation reforms has become a key development priority in recent years. In 2001, the Bank issued a first Trade and Transport Facilitation Audit (TTFA) toolkit. The TTFA provides a simple and cost-effective instrument to analyze bottlenecks in international supply chains and prepare corrective measures. The key insight of the TTFA is that considerable knowledge can be easily obtained by interviewing key participants in the commercial or procedural transactions that combine to form international supply chains. These participants include private service providers such as freight forwarders, exporters, transporters and bankers as well as public agencies such as customs, port authorities, and transport regulators. Many government and development agencies have implemented the toolkit, including the World Bank, which has conducted about 50 audits prior to 2009. The new edition provides an opportunity not only to reflect the changes in the trade environment and the need for additional features in the toolkit, but also to benefit from the experiences of the audits already undertaken based on the original edition and hence give the new toolkit an even more operational focus. The modular organization proposed in the document should facilitate a progressive reading, by adding an increasing degree of detail. The first chapter introduces the conceptual framework for the TTFA. The second chapter discusses some of the reasons for conducting an audit. The third describes the implementation of the Audit including planning and scheduling, resource requirements and organization of the analysis and preparation of the reports. The annexes provide additional information on the concept, the methodology and content of the audit. The Interview Guides provides the scope for the meetings and checklists for all categories of interviewees and
field visits. The toolkit has been written for the different possible audiences interested in trade facilitation and logistics in developing countries, including:. Policy makers in developing countries;. Development practitioners, including staff from development agencies supervising the implementation of the audits, such as Country economists or Operational task managers, in the World Bank or in other development institutions. Trade/Transport facilitation consultants or consulting firms.
eBook
Trade and Transport Facilitation Assessment
Trade facilitation and logistics have become an important policy area in development. Supply chain constraints are now recognized as a major impediment to export led growth. The Trade and Transport Facilitation Assessment (TTFA) is a practical tool to identify the obstacles to the fluidity of trade supply chains. Taking the perspective of service delivery to traders, the TTFA assessment is founded on facts and data collected through a series of meetings and interviews with the main public and private participants to these international supply chains. They include customs and other border agencies, transport regulators, freight forwarders, transport operators, ports, and others. The toolkit helps design plans of action to improve logistics performance among its three main dimensions: infrastructure, services, and procedures and processes. This new edition of the toolkit provides an opportunity not only to reflect the changes in the trade environment and the need for additional features in the toolkit, but also to benefit from the experiences of the assessments already undertaken based on the original edition. In 2001, the Bank issued a first TTFA toolkit based on an original concept developed by John Raven. This initial concept was extensively revised to give the new toolkit an increased operational focus. The semantic change from audit to assessment also reflects the expansion in scope and the emphasis on development of implementable actions beyond the initial diagnosis.
Book
Berlin
Berlin: Culture and Metropolis was first published in 1991. Berlin’s recent history is uniquely representative of the major upheavals of the modern era. The city has been a capital under imperialist, democratic, fascist, and communist regimes; it has been devastated by war and has witnessed two revolutions. These changes often have come rapidly, drastically, and unexpectedly. Berlin: Culture and Metropolis includes essays on literature, poetry, film, cabaret, and the visual arts that illustrate how the relationship between the city and its inhabitants has been repeatedly renegotiated with each generation. Scholars in art history, film studies, literature, history, and sociology cover the period from the turn of the century to the present, writing on such topics as twentieth century cabaret, the celebration of the city’s 750th anniversary, and the cultural contributions of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, George Grosz, Alfred Döblin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Christa Wolf. These essays reveal the often uneasy relationships between twentieth-century Berlin and the culture these changes have produced.
eBook
Persistent and transient productive inefficiency
The productive efficiency of a firm can be seen as composed of two parts, one persistent and one transient. The received empirical literature on the measurement of productive efficiency has paid relatively little attention to the difference between these two components. Ahn and Sickles (Econ Rev 19(4):461–492, 2000) suggested some approaches that pointed in this direction. The possibility was also raised in Greene (Health Econ 13(10):959–980, 2004. doi:10.1002/hec. 938), who expressed some pessimism over the possibility of distinguishing the two empirically. Recently, Colombi (A skew normal stochastic frontier model for panel data, 2010) and Kumbhakar and Tsionas (J Appl Econ 29(1):110–132, 2012), in a milestone extension of the stochastic frontier methodology have proposed a tractable model based on panel data that promises to provide separate estimates of the two components of efficiency. The approach developed in the original presentation proved very cumbersome actually to implement in practice. Colombi (2010) notes that FIML estimation of the model is ‘complex and time consuming.’ In the sequence of papers, Colombi (2010), Colombi et al. (A stochastic frontier model with short-run and long-run inefficiency random effects, 2011, J Prod Anal, 2014), Kumbhakar et al. (J Prod Anal 41(2):321–337, 2012) and Kumbhakar and Tsionas (2012) have suggested other strategies, including a four step least squares method. The main point of this paper is that full maximum likelihood estimation of the model is neither complex nor time consuming. The extreme complexity of the log likelihood noted in Colombi (2010), Colombi et al. (2011, 2014) is reduced by using simulation and exploiting the Butler and Moffitt (Econometrica 50:761–764, 1982) formulation. In this paper, we develop a practical full information maximum simulated likelihood estimator for the model. The approach is very effective and strikingly simple to apply, and uses all of the sample distributional information to obtain the estimates. We also implement the panel data counterpart of the Jondrow et al. (J Econ 19(2–3): 233–238, 1982) estimator for technical or cost inefficiency. The technique is applied in a study of the cost efficiency of Swiss railways.
Journal Article
Validity and reliability of the virtual audit tool for estimating built-environment characteristics in Taiwan
Background
Environmental factors significantly influence health behaviors and outcomes. While Google Street View (GSV) has emerged as a cost-effective tool for environmental auditing in various countries, its feasibility in Taiwan remains unexplored. This study aimed to examine the validity and reliability of GSV-based environmental audits in Taiwan.
Methods
Four administrative districts in Taipei representing different population densities and socioeconomic status were selected. A total of 74 street segments within 40 streets were evaluated using both virtual and field audits. The S-VAT was modified to include 8 categories (38 items) of neighborhood characteristics. To assess criterion validity, field and virtual audits were conducted by one rater with a minimum two-week interval. Inter-rater reliability was evaluated by comparing two raters’ virtual audit results, while intra-rater reliability was assessed through repeated virtual audits by the same rater. Cohen’s Kappa and percentage agreement were used for statistical analysis.
Results
Walking-related (k = 0.768), cycling-related (k = 0.921), and public transport features demonstrated high reliability. Lower reliability was found in aesthetics and grocery stores, primarily due to GSV limitations: aesthetic features (litter, graffiti) were affected by viewing angles and temporal variations, while grocery stores were challenging to assess due to restricted storefront visibility and signage clarity.
Conclusions
The S-VAT demonstrates good validity and reliability for environmental auditing in Taiwan, particularly for transportation-related features. However, caution should be exercised when assessing grocery stores and aesthetic features. This study validates GSV as a feasible tool for conducting environmental audits in Taiwan.
Journal Article
Sources of displaced workers' long-term earnings losses
We estimate the magnitudes of reduced earnings, work hours, and wage rates of workers displaced during the Great Recession using linked employer-employee panel data from Washington state. Displaced workers’ earnings losses occurred mainly because hourly wage rates dropped at the time of displacement and recovered sluggishly. Lost employer-specific premiums explain only 17 percent of these losses. Fully 70 percent of displaced workers moved to employers paying the same or higher wage premiums than the displacing employers, but these workers nevertheless suffered substantial wage rate losses. Loss of valuable specific worker-employer matches explains more than one-half of the wage losses.
Journal Article
Environmental and Safety Performance of European Railways: An Integrated Efficiency Assessment
Railways play a pivotal role in advancing environmentally conscious and safe transportation systems, positioning them as a vital component of Europe’s future mobility strategy. This study tackles the complex dimensions of sustainability in railway transport by combining environmental impacts and safety considerations within a single, integrated analytical framework. We extend the variable intermediate slack-based measure (VSBM) model to incorporate undesirable outputs—specifically accidents and emissions—allowing for a joint evaluation of safety and environmental performance. The revised model is applied to assess the operational efficiency of 14 European railway operators between 2010 and 2018. Compared to conventional efficiency models, our enhanced VSBM approach provides improved discriminatory power and reveals significant changes in relative efficiency rankings. By integrating safety and environmental dimensions, this study contributes a new perspective on sustainable railway performance measurement.
Journal Article
Direct and indirect emissions: a bi-objective model for hybrid vehicle routing problem
This research proposes a mathematical model for the vehicle routing problem (VRP), which involves pickup and delivery of cargos to different depots. Vehicle capacity and energy consumption that varies with load are both contributing factors. The mathematical model seeks to simultaneously reduce costs and waiting time for customers. Multi-objective particle swarm optimisation (MPSO) and Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) are proposed as methods to solve the model. This is implemented and solved in the GAMS software for moderate-sized problems, and the results are compared to those obtained by two different algorithms in order to validate the model and algorithms. Then, the results are compared with those obtained by NSGA-II algorithm based on comparative metrics.
Journal Article
Running a car costs much more than people think — stalling the uptake of green travel
Car owners underestimate total vehicle costs. Giving consumers this information could encourage the switch to cleaner transport and reduce emissions.
Running a car costs much more than you think
Car owners underestimate total vehicle costs. Giving consumers this information could encourage the switch to cleaner transport and reduce emissions.
Journal Article