Namibia’s development objective is to reduce the costs of cross-border trade and to create a more conducive investment environment. However, international competitiveness rankings suggest the country still has some way to go in this respect. Namibia ranks 138 out of 190 countries in the Doing Business (DB) 2020 report, which is the third poorest performance for the country of all indicators used to compile the DB index, after registering property and starting a business.
Namibia relies on imports for most of the consumer and producer goods and on exports of raw materials and processed goods to regional and international markets. Furthermore, one of the country’s main development objectives is to become the logistic hub for the region, which resulted in substantial investment into transport infrastructure including the expansion of the Walvis Bay harbor. Hence, smooth cross-border procedures are essential to achieving this development objective.
The significance of the cross-border operations, the PSD included two questions referring to border procedures on the Namibian and the foreign side of the border. Trading across borders is linked to the size of firms. On average, 70% of the respondents do not trade across borders with the share being highest for micro-companies (80%) and lowest for large companies (17%). The majority of small firms (55%) are not trading across borders, while it is a minority of medium-sized enterprises (45%). A larger share of cosmetics (60%) and metal fabrication (70%) companies were involved in trade than of other manufacturing firms (40%).