Journal of Economics, Management and Trade

Customs clearance is a force step on international trade. The evolution and grow of international trade has made more important and complex the task assigned to customs services. Now day’s customs administration is a relevant regulatory operator in international trade and goods movements as facilitator and accelerator of trade. However, the study of efficiency on the public sector is always more complex than the study of efficiency in the private, profit-oriented sector. Due to, the measurement of efficiency in the public services implies a bigger effort in the identification of relevant outputs and inputs. The address questions are: 1. How big is the trade impact caused by customs regulation across countries on economic variables such as efficiency and 2. What measures should be taken in order to achieve the efficiency goal. The aim of this research is focused on determining the relative efficiency of countries customs as a key of international trade considering 4 inputs and 3 outputs for 29 countries through the data envelopment analysis (DEA) the findings point out that according to the global technical efficiency which departs from constant returns to scale (CRS), 8 customs houses were efficient. While the scores of the pure technical efficiency (variable returns-to-scale), 14 customs houses were efficient. The efficiency of de CRS efficiency to VRS efficiency increase which is particularly significant.