Organizational Capabilities for Integrated Customs Risk Management: A Structured Scoping Review of Accessible Research with Implications for Morocco

Abstract

Customs administrations use risk management to allocate scarce inspection capacity among revenue protection, security and trade facilitation. Earlier syntheses list the themes of this field without connecting the organizational mechanisms they invoke to the level of evidence behind each claimed outcome, and none examines what this evidence means for Morocco, where customs revenue reached 144.8 billion dirhams in 2024 for more than two million declarations. This structured scoping review answers three questions. RQ1 asks which informational and organizational mechanisms are supported by accessible research. RQ2 asks which fiscal, security and facilitation outcomes have been evaluated and with what strength of evidence. RQ3 asks which conditions govern the transfer of these findings to Moroccan customs. A documented web retrieval strategy executed on 18 October 2026 captured 378 records in English and French published since 2020, and 32 contributions met the eligibility criteria. Screening and extraction were assisted by a large language model workflow with recorded decisions and human verification of every screening decision. Framework guided narrative synthesis graded every link between a mechanism and an outcome according to research design. One study provides strong evidence of an administrative effect, twelve provide moderate evidence from computational benchmarks, surveys or interview-based cases and nineteen provide weak descriptive or conceptual evidence. Information quality, inspection feedback and integrity safeguards receive the most consistent support, whereas coordination mechanisms rest on descriptive cases. The review contributes a graded explanatory framework, an evidence matrix, prioritized implications for the Moroccan customs administration and a research agenda.

JEL Classification: F13; H26; H83

Paper type: Literature review (structured scoping review)