An Empirial Study on Vietnam’s Trade Faclilitation in the Digital Economy

Purpose - Vietnam is among the fastest growing digital economies in the Southeast Asian region, and has made enormous efforts to adopt digital measures to facilitate trade. The paper aims to assess Vietnam’s performance of digital trade facilitation and estimate the impact of digital trade facilitation on Vietnam’s exports to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Design/Methodology/Approach - Vietnam’s implementation of digital trade facilitation is assessed through a constructed framework based on two groups of indicators, including Information Availability and Formalities Automation extracted from the OECD Trade Facilitation database. Further, a gravity model was adopted to estimate the impact of digital trade facilitation on Vietnam’s exports. Findings - The results show that Vietnam performs a slightly better than the average level of ASEAN countries. However, Vietnam’s implementation of digital trade facilitation tends to be ỉmproving at a slower rate than other ASEAN countries’ implementations, as well as the country’s overall implementation of other trade facilitation. The paper is among leading studies to quantify the impact of digital trade facilitation on Vietnam’s exports to ASEAN countries, and finds that if Vietnam and ASEAN countries increase trade facilitation through Information Availability measures by 1%, Vietnam’s exports will increase more than proportionately by 1.29% and 1.01%, respectively. Meanwhile, the digitalization of trade formalities so far has had no effect on Vietnam’s exports to this region. Research Implications - Vietnam should place priority on enhancing automation in trade-related administrative procedures, especially in customs procedures. Furthermore, it should pay more attention to promote the electronic publication of trade-related information, enhance the transparency of government policymaking, and increase the quality of enquiry points.