V.E AUMENTO DEL CAPITAL CIRCULANTE

Some West African countries procure their petroleum supplies on a least FOB cost basis. There are several regional markets where prices for petroleum products are set, with the lowest costs often found in Singapore or London. These markets are far from West Africa, however, so delivery to destinations in the region can involve high transport and insurance costs, particularly if the procurement is for small quantities.

Although maritime freight and insurance costs together typically aver- age only about 5 percent of the delivered cost in most regions, they can amount to closer to 10 percent when petroleum is procured from a distant source. When these higher transport and insurance costs are added to the FOB price from London or Singapore, the delivered cost can be higher than if the procurement had been on a least CIF price basis, which would probably result in procurement from a closer supplier, such as Nigeria. Source: World Bank 2012.

Corridor Performance Indicators 117 helpful in identifying problems in specific corridors or supply chains and

whether and how the problems are amenable to correction.

Country-level performance indicators can provide a measure of the progress made in introducing various trade and transport reforms. Indicators of such reforms could include the following:

• private participation in the ownership and operation of trade and transport infrastructure

• use of modern customs practices

• availability of financial instruments to support trade transactions • use of technologies for electronic commerce.

Corridor Level

The corridor level is often the level of decision making at which perfor- mance indicators can have the greatest practical impact, as they reveal where in the supply chains of specific products or specific corridors the impedi- ments to logistics efficiency occur. Potential measures to address the imped- iments can be designed and their potential impact evaluated by analyzing indicators at this level.

Use of indicators at this level of decision making implies that decisions at the strategic level have already been made, implicitly or explicitly. If they have not been made, and there is no intention to provide indicators to indi- cate the efficacy of current choices of strategy, it must be assumed that those choices are optimal or not open to question. The indicators appropriate for use at this policy level illustrate performance at each principal stage of a supply chain or in a particular corridor.

Trade policy issues at this level include issues related to the demand for specific trade facilitation services. They can best be addressed in the context of supply chains or corridors where impediments to logistics efficiency are most likely to be found and where any new options for addressing such impediments are likely to exist (World Bank 2004, 2006a, 2006b). Indicators at this level can also address whether the relationships between costs and prices in a particular situation are indicative of a market failure or whether the overall price and quality offered by logistics services in a particular supply chain or corridor are likely to make the products using them competitive in the markets they are aimed at.

A tradeoff needs to be made between the level of detail included in the indicators—where more detail indicates a more useful indicator—and the maximum level of detail that is comprehensible by the people expected to act on the interpretation of the indicators. Less detail usually implies easier

118 Trade and Transport Corridor Management Toolkit comprehension and understanding. Indicators used at this level can rarely lead to a definitive policy conclusion. Instead, they provide indications that one policy is likely to be more effective than another.

Project Level

The third level at which indicators can be used is in the assessment of impacts at the level of projects aimed at resolving specific issues identified at the policy level. The indicators can refer either to the intensity of use of physical infrastructure (such as the TEU handled per port berth) or to the quality and efficiency of infrastructure services (such as the turnaround time of container ships at berths). In the same way that use of indicators at the policy level implies prior decision making at the strategic level, the use of indicators at the project level implies prior decision making at the policy level or the making of assumptions that policy choices already made are in some sense optimal or not open to question.

Indicators of the use of physical infrastructure at this level have been in use for some time. However, they have not resulted in values that can be used comparatively, nor have they achieved widespread acceptance. Quality of service indicators frequently used at this level are generally well understood but diffi cult to measure with any precision. The values or units of measure of both infrastructure and service quality indicators are expected to change signifi cantly over time, although the concepts of the indicators may remain more constant.

The remainder of this module focuses on the performance of corridor- level parameters to assist in decision making at the international corridor level. Resources to assist in measuring performance at the country level are indicated in Module 1. Indicators that help at the project level are so specific to the project being considered that it is not feasible to give advice on what should be measured and how it should be measured.

The performance indicators described in the module are only the basic indicators necessary to assess any international trade corridor. They are aimed at determining whether a corridor is performing well in terms of delivering its traded goods to markets at a competitive price and if not, what aspect of performance provides the greatest potential for improvement. Once these assessments have been made, and the general location of oppor- tunities for improvement found, a more detailed level of indicator is needed to find what opportunities for improvement exist. Some of the common ones are described in the corridor-specific modules in Part II.

As an example, use of the basic indicators might show that containerized goods transported in a particular international trade corridor are not

Corridor Performance Indicators 119 competitive in their destination market and that it is at the port in the transit

country where there appears to be the greatest opportunity for improve- ment (reduction in the level of times or costs or increases in their level of reliability). More detailed port performance indicators are needed to deter- mine where in the port these opportunities are to be found. It would not be worthwhile to measure these more detailed port indicators if the use of the basic indicators shows that the port is performing well and the problems are to be found elsewhere.