ABSTRACT
Trade and investment facilitation is a series of actions to simplify international trade and investment procedures through comprehensive and coordinated implementation in accordance with internationally accepted norms, standards and practices, eliminate barriers to international trade investment, reduce transaction costs in international trade activities and capital flows and ensure efficiency, transparency and predictability in trade and investment procedures. To be more specific, trade and investment facilitation can be further divided into trade facilitation and investment facilitation. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) was the first organisation to put trade facilitation in the work agenda during the 1996 Singapore ministerial-level meeting, whereas investment facilitation becoming an independent topic of discussion first appeared in the Investment Facilitation Action Plan (IFAP) published by APEC in 2008.
