WCO lauds India’s trade facilitation plan:

WCO lauds India’s trade facilitation plan: 

Trade Facilitation Pact to promote Ease of doing business:

Context: The World Customs Organisation (WCO) describes India’s National Trade Facilitation Action Plan (NTFAP) as a best practice other nations can adopt. Introduction:

• A National Trade Facilitation Action Plan has been released for a time bound map for implementing of the TFA.
• The WCO, the international body supporting the uniform implementation of the TFA across the globe has 182 member nations including India that manage more than 98% or world trade.
• As per the WTO, “the full implementation of the TFA could boost global trade by up to $ 1 trillion per year.”

Objectives of National Action Plan:

• The objectives to be achieved by national action plan were improvement in ease of doing business by reduction in cargo release time and cost, paperless work, transparent and predictable legal regime.
• Improved investment climate through better infrastructure.
• The action plan released by India comprises concrete steps for moving the agenda ahead and also fixed accountability and time frame for accomplishing the plan.
• TFA would simplify procedures and enhance competitiveness making economies more vibrant leading to increase in revenue.
• Trade facilitation will play a key role for India to achieve its goal of becoming a high middle-income level economy.
• The TFA is meant to ease customs norms for faster flow of goods across borders-had come into force in February 2017.
• The NTFAP, which is to be implemented between 2017 and 2020, is part of India’s efforts to improve its ease of doing business ranking.
• India’s overall rank in the World Bank’s Doing Business report is 130, it ranks 144 out of 190 nations in the ‘Trading Across Borders’ category.

Key points:

• The WCO is impressed by the fact that as many as 51 of the 76 activities mentioned in the NTFAP “go beyond” the implementation requirements of the World Trade Organisation’s Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA)
• Infrastructure and technology augmentation are prime enablers for trade facilitation, more so for India, the action plan (NTFAP) covers many activities in these areas.
• India had ratified the TFA in April 2016.

Global benchmarks:

• Enhancement of existing compliance levels to achieve global benchmarks in crucial segments like Time Release Study, Post Clearance Audit and AEO (Authorised Economi Operator) scheme belong to the TFA Plus category as they are dynamic objectives.

Deadline:

• Out of the total 51 “TFA-plus activities”, most (or 34) have a timeline of six to 18 months
• 12 of the “TFA-Plus activities” have a deadline of up to six months; five such activities have a timeline of 18-36 months including improving infrastructure.
• Out of the 25 activities that are part of the TFA requirements, 17 will be implemented within 6-18 months, while eight have a timeline of up to six months.

World Customs Organization:

• The World Customs Organization (WCO) is an intergovernmental organisation headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.
• It has 182 member nations (including India) that manage more than 98 % of world trade.
• The WCO is covers areas like development of international conventions, instruments, and tools on topics such as commodity classification, valuation, rules of origin, collection of customs revenue, supply chain security, international trade facilitation, customs enforcement activities, combating counterfeiting in support of Intellectual Property Rights(IPR), drugs enforcement, illegal weapons trading, integrity promotion, and delivering sustainable capacity building to assist with customs reforms and modernization.
• The WCO maintains the international Harmonized System (HS) goods nomenclature, and administers the technical aspects of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreements on Customs Valuation and Rules of Origin.

Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA):

• The TFA is the WTO’s first-ever multilateral accord that aims to simplify customs regulations for the cross-border movement of goods.