Evaluation of customs supervision competitiveness using principal component analysis

Abstract

In order to improve the degree of security and facilitation of the business environment; customs administrations are constantly working to strengthen their own institutional innovation and governance in customs control. As such, this paper establishes an evaluation index of international customs supervision competitiveness based on the eight indexes extracted from the World Customs Organisation (WCO) Revised Kyoto Convention and selects 21 representative national customs using the principal component analysis (PCA) method to assess their competitiveness against SPSSAU quantitatively. Based on the data from the World Economic Forum, World Bank, OECD, WCO Annual Report, and Transparency International, the Dutch customs have relatively the best performance in the range of comprehensive competitiveness, and customs authorities in Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, and Singapore also have relatively-best performance under different indexes. Taking China Customs as an example, the gaps between China Customs and the ones with the best performance are also analyzed. In response to the problems identified by the analysis, recommendations are made in the areas of process facilitation, technology application, international cooperation, economic development, taxation management, and capacity building to improve the competitiveness of customs control.