Who Takes Most Benefit from AEO Certification? An Austrian Perspective

In this paper, the TAXUD AEO Database was employed and supplemented with company data to make a census of AEO certifications per company size (in term of employees and revenue) and export/import quotas in the case of Austria 2008-2013 in order to find out who takes most benefit from AEO certification. Findings can be simply summarized as follows: The more export oriented a sector is, the more AEO certifications are granted within there. More specific, about 49% of all AEO certifications at Austria are granted to companies from the manufacturing industry, followed by about 29% to transport and logistics service providers and 18% to wholesale or retail companies - others like primary sector, energy provision and service industry are rather negligible. Having a closer look on the Austrian AEO certified companies, most of them from the manufacturing industry can be classified as SME in the EU-sense but are being heavily export-oriented at the same time and in need of an AEO certificate to smooth their export/import operations. Transport and logistics service providers do benefit from AEO certification, too, but are rather being pushed to do it by their customers.