The adoption of the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) in December 2013 at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Ministerial Conference held in Bali, Indonesia, was a landmark achievement for the global trade community. The so-called ‘Bali Package’ marked an end to trade negotiations tha...
The Royal Malaysian Customs Department is working on a new information system, known as uCustoms, which will enable effective information-sharing, streamlined procedures, and genuine collaboration among all agencies involved in the clearance process.
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The New Zealand Customs Service is getting closer to completing a major modernization project, called the Joint Border Management System. The system has two key components: the development and implementation of the New Zealand Trade Single Window; and a...
The environment surrounding Customs administrations is changing rapidly. The conclusion by the World Trade Organization (WTO) of its Trade Facilitation Agreement in December 2013 demands that governments make further efforts to simplify trade procedures and ensure more transparency in trade regul...
In the 20-plus years since first being established in Singapore and Sweden, Single Windows (SWs) have remained the central focus of border clearance strategies. The implementation of such an environment is generally seen by trade experts around the world as a very ...
Canada is internationally recognized as one of the best places in the world to do business. If it is to maintain its competitive edge, increase productivity and spur innovation, Canada must constantly strive to improve the conditions for doing business. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) pl...
The Botswana Unified Revenue Service recently implemented a new, modern IT system to manage their foreign trade operations. The migration from the old to the new system had to be smooth to ensure business continuity. This article presents the rationale behind the m...
Rationale for migrating to a new system
Several factors influenced the decision to move to a new system. Botswana’s rankings in the World Bank’s flagship report, Doing Business 2011, prompted measures that were aimed ...
Over the last five years, the global economy has been changing. Consumers are buying more goods online, e-commerce is flourishing, and supply chains are moving at a breakneck speed. At the same time, the number of trade agreements is growing, and countries are increasingly more focused on regulat...
The Saudi economic and social reform plan, called Saudi Vision 2030, aims at inducing long-term economic growth that is not reliant only upon oil exports. Saudi Arabia is the largest market in the MENA region and a gateway to a region of over 424 million consumers. Leveraging its unique geographi...
Integrating the Single Window into TradeLens
Since 2017, Saudi Customs had been actively engaging in the digitalization of its clearance procedures and its handling of shipments. An electronic national system for the mana...
This year’s WCO theme is ‘coordinated border management’ (CBM), which signals our collective aspiration to strengthen our working relationships with other government agencies responsible for Customs-related responsibilities, trade partners, and border agencies. For some time now, the WCO ha...
Between 2016 and 2020, many new electronic Customs systems will be developed within the European Union (EU). The new systems will have new data requirements based on a new WCO compatible data model, called the EU Customs Data Model (EU CDM). The EU CDM will enable ...
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with its Hong Kong counterpart in November 2017 to jointly develop a cross-border distributed ledger technology (DLT) based infrastructure that will link up digital tr...
“If it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
TradeNet is almost 30 years old. Launched in 1989, when the Internet was still the domain of academics and researchers, it was well ahead of its time and its successful implementatio...