Prof. Xue Presented at the Global Facilitation Partnership for Transportation and Trade 2016 Annual Forum
The Global Facilitation Partnership for Transportation and Trade (GPF) 2016 Annual Forum, organized by ICC, UNIDO and ITC, was successfully held at Invest Shanghai, 15/F New Town Tower, Shanghai. More than 80 representatives from the international organizations (ICC, UNIDO, ITC, UNECE, WCO. UNCTAD), customs authorities (Cambodia, Guatemala), private sector and academia joined the meeting and shared their views on a variety of trade facilitation issues in the nutshell of implementation of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA). ICC China invited around 20 businessmen (including Huawei, Alibaba, Sinotrans) from China and other countries to join the Forum.
Prof. Xue gave a presentation at the session on “regional integration”. Prof. Xue talked about the importance of the newly formed UNESCAP Framework Agreement on Facilitation of Cross-Border Paperless Trade in Asia and the Pacific (FA) to the regional integration in the following three aspects.
(1) Legal harmonization across the region
Deep regulatory fragmentation and variation of laws and regulations are pledging the cross-border paperless trade. The FA that is completely complimentary to the WTO TFA provides the legal framework to harmonize the regulatory systems in the region through encouraging the Member States to adopt to the international laws and standards (particularly from UN/CEFACT, ISO and WCO) in their domestic laws.
(2) Legal connectivity
The FA, particularly Art. 8, provides the mutual recognition of e-data and document originated from the other Member States at the substantially equivalent level of reliability, which removes the legal barrier of cross-border paperless trade. The substantially equivalent level of reliability may be achieved through the institutional arrangement of the FA (such as the protocols) or bilateral or multilateral agreements among the Member States. The current FTAs (such as TPP, RCEP), if consistent with the FA, may also be linked up to enable the mutual recognition.
(3) Engagement with the private sector
Prof. Xue emphasized the importance to engage the private sector in composing and implementing the Action Plan, Road Map and pilot projects of the FA and called their participation in the FA process.
Prof. Xue’s presentation on FA was very well received by the audience. Dr. Saeed from ITC (who is a member of UNNeXT) gave the positive comments. All the participants are getting more interested in the FA and its future implementation. The representative from DHL supported the FA initiative and hoped that its implementation would release logistic companies from submitting both e-copies and paper forms for customs clearance. Prof. Xue responded that “data submitted once” is the kernel of Single Window (SW) definition and the requirement of dual submission is not consistent with UN/CEFACT Rec. 33 on SW. However, if a country has no SW in place, the principle of non-discrimination does not exclude the coexistence of both e-form and paper form. Prof. Xue also briefly talked about the Chinese e-commerce lawmaking.
The newly formed China’s National TF Commission to implement the TFA, Huawei’s Global Customs Project, Alibaba OneTouch and the pilot APEC Model E-Port Network (APMEN) (like PAA exchanging e-data and documents among the ports in the network) are all interesting initiatives and deserve further research.