Lessons about the amount of time necessary to eliminate quantitative restrictions and tariffs are difficult to draw. Some reforms have taken a long time - Korea and the countries of southern Europe, for instance, have still not completed their reforms after at least two decades. Fewer have been completed within the medium term - the process lasted five years in Chile, for example. But none have been fully implemented over the short-term. There is no obvious relationship between the length of the period of policy reform and its chances of success. But the apparently low adjustment costs in most trade reforms, together with the danger that more lengthy reforms will be less credible, are arguments for faster reform.
Some tariff reforms have used institutions, typically tariff commissions, either to set tariffs on a case-by-case basis or to hear appeals for exceptions to the reforms that have been scheduled. Tariff commissions such as those in Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka have often approached their task with too many objectives so that their work has probably not contributed to increasing neutrality.