| Feature |
| The April 2010 issue of ADB Knowledge Showcases newsletter looks at the bilateral dimensions of the CAREC Trade Facilitation Agenda between Mongolia and the People's Republic of China. More... |
Smoother, Faster, Cheaper Trade
The CAREC region sits at the heart of the rapidly integrating Eurasian continent. CAREC countries are working together to improve the region's transport infrastructure and reduce the cost of trade across regions. The CAREC Transport and Trade Facilitation Strategy presents a shared vision of transport and trade facilitation development in the region to 2017.
The Strategy identifies three trade facilitation goals:
- Improve administrative efficiency and simplify, standardize, and harmonize trade procedures to significantly reduce transaction costs and time.
- Encourage free movement of goods and business people.
- Enhance the transparency of laws, regulations, procedures, and forms, and share information on these and other trade issues.
The Trade Facilitation program supports two major components:
- Customs cooperation continues to be a major focus of the strategy. The medium term objective will be to promote concerted customs reforms and modernization, with the Customs Cooperation Committee (CCC) serving as a regional forum to address issues of common interest. Main customs reform work areas
are
- Simplification and harmonization of custom procedures. This is the core requirement of the revised Kyoto Convention and the trade facilitation program will support this effort with the ultimate aim of including the procedures and forms of other agencies.
- ICT for customs modernization and data exchange. Automation of customs systems (import, export and transit declarations) will facilitate exchange of information, speeding clearance times and the movement of traffic across borders.
- Risk management and post entry audit. An audit-based post-clearance/post-release control regime is a requirement of the revised Kyoto Convention. If supported by effective risk management systems and procedures, post-entry audit will reduce customs controls at the borders and enable more efficient allocation of scarce resources.
- Joint customs control. Joint customs control is the initial step toward joint agency controls and eventually single-window controls that will allow traders to lodge information with a single-body to fulfill all import/export related regulatory requirements.
- Regional transit development. Accession to the TIR Convention and efficient operations of TIR in CAREC are important. The work program will continue to support development of prudent bilateral and regional transit arrangements.
- Integrated trade facilitation (ITF) aims to establish a regional mechanism to complement and strengthen the CCC process, building on inter-agency cooperation and partnership with the private sector. The ITF work program will focus on:
- promoting the establishment of national joint transport and trade facilitation coordinating committee (the national joint committee, or NJC) and a CAREC regional joint transport and trade facilitation coordinating committee (RJC) in order to engage a wider range of other national agencies involved in trade and border control;
- supporting the adoption of the single window scheme to streamline transport, freight forwarding, trade logistics and customs operations and enhance the competitiveness of the CAREC countries;
- implementing a corridors performance measurement and monitoring (CPMM) scheme to ascertain the current situation along the links and nodes of each CAREC priority corridor, identify bottlenecks, and determine courses of action to address such bottlenecks.
