The Greater Tumen Initiative (GTI) is an intergovernmental cooperation mechanism with four member countries, all in Northeast Asia: China, Mongolia, Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation. Because of the lackluster performance of the GTI in the past, member countries have shown little interest in actively participating in GTI. Only recently has more attention been directed towards GTI by member countries, as the growth potential of the Russian Far East and the Northeast provinces of China were realized by policy makers. Korea also has been actively participating in GTI activities as the GTI can be a stepping stone for pushing ahead with the Park administration’s Eurasia Initiative. Furthermore, developing the Greater Tumen Region (GTR) provides an opportunity for the two Koreas to prepare for eventual unification. Although there exists some studies in trade facilitation in the GTR, little work has been done using empirical methodology along with analysis based on survey results. To our knowledge, our proposal represents the only work using both empirical and descriptive approaches to analyze trade facilitation issues of GTR.
Unlike other economic cooperation mechanisms such as ASEAN or EU, the inter-regional trade concentration ratio has fallen recently, implying that there is room for economic integration in the GTR. Also, we find that some GTI member countries have poor transportation infrastructure and lack appropriate trade facilitation measures. The current status of implementation of the trade facilitation in the GTR thus highlights the necessity of economic cooperation, to facilitate trade in the region. The empirical result of the proposal implies that trade partners, both the exporting country and the importing country, should improve their trade facilitation measures to fully benefit from trade. We considered a set of policy variables and logistic performance variables that affect the volume of trade of GTI member countries. We find that among the policy variables, logistical infrastructure has the greatest impact on trade, followed by custom procedures and logistics service capacity. Among logistic performance variables, timeliness has the most impact on trade, followed by international shipments and tracking and tracing.  
We complement our empirical analysis by conducting interviews with customs and traders working in the GTR. The 4-steps custom procedures are common to the member countries; document preparation & custom declaration, physical inspection, duty collection, out approval. However, required documents and other regulations for each step varied among the GTI member countries. For instance, the e-payment system is not fully implemented in the Russian Federation and Mongolia while Korea and China allow duty payments through the Internet. GTI member countries also had issues in common regarding custom transparency and high levels of physical inspection rates, hampering the efficient movements of cross-border trade.
The level of implementation of trade facilitation measures varied in many aspects. Korea was the only country to fully implement paperless trade. Other countries have partially introduced paperless trade, but for some countries the partial implementation has actually become burdensome to traders as the legal framework has not changed accordingly. Advance ruling is a measure that could help prevent disputes of classification and issues related to valuation, but Mongolia has yet to introduce such a policy. Also, even though risk management, AEO and AEO MRA are recommended for countries with high physical inspection rates, these trade facilitation measures were also not fully implemented for some countries.
Based on our analysis, we propose short-term and long-term goals for trade facilitation in the GTR. Publication of laws, regulations and procedures is pointed out as our top priorities and objectives, as it relates to timeliness which has been verified to have the greatest impact on GTI countries’ trade among logistics performance measures. We also discuss the possibilities of securing the funds to obtain this goal. For trade capacity building in Mongolia, we may consider utilizing the WTO TFAF or using a bilateral aid fund from Korea. The second short-term goal we propose is to evaluate regularly the non-tariff policy measures of GTI countries using either the OECD trade facilitation index or following the APEC Supply-chain Connectivity Framework Action Plan.
The following goals are classified as long term. As Russia and Mongolia lacks the AEO system consistent with WCO, only after these countries have fully implemented the AEO program could we expect to conclude AEO MRAs with all GTI member countries. The results of the pilot study of the Korea-China AEO MRA prove that the completion of AEO MRAs of all GTI member countries could contribute to trade facilitation in the GTR significantly. Although a significant impact from the implementation of the Single Window in GTR trade facilitation is expected based on our empirical study, securing the considerable amount of funds required to complete this task may not be easy. Thus, as a second-best plan, we propose to support the developing countries of GTI in the form of sharing knowledge for ICT and custom automation. Lastly, we also consider the possibility of constructing a common classification system at a disaggregate level. As the classification is based on domestic industry and involves politics, unifying the system may take time. However, as we know that the common classification of ASEAN and EU has contributed to trade facilitation in the region, starting a discussion on this issue may be meaningful in the long run.