GAO: U.S. must measure trade capacity building efforts

GAO: U.S. must measure trade capacity building efforts    A U.S. Government Accountability Office report said the federal government must do more to measure its trade capacity building efforts with developing countries.
   “Most of the U.S. agencies we reviewed are not systematically measuring the results of their trade capacity building assistance or evaluating its effectiveness,” the GAO report said.
   The federal government defines trade capacity building as providing help to countries seeking to accede to the World Trade Organization.
   U.S. agencies self-reported that they had provided almost $2.9 billion in trade capacity building assistance to more than 100 countries for fiscal 2001 to 2004. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided 71 percent of the government’s total trade capacity building funding.
   USAID told the GAO that developing “performance indicators” for trade capacity building is difficult, but the agency has started to work on this problem.
   “Without a strategy for evaluating the effectiveness of its trade capacity building assistance, the United States cannot identify what works and what does not work to ensure the reasonable use of resources for these efforts,” the GAO report said.
   The GAO recommended that USAID set “milestones” for completing its efforts to develop performance indicators for results measurement and periodic evaluations. USAID agreed with this recommendation.