Trade facilitation is the ability of countries to deliver goods and services on time at the lowest possible cost. It has emerged as an important issue in unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral trade liberalization.
... See More + Most countries have embarked on heroic reforms aimed at reducing transaction costs of trade. Thus, among the four new Singapore issues, there was least resistance from World Trade Organization (WTO) member countries to include trade facilitation in the Doha Round discussions. However, all countries are not equally placed in initiating reforms in the complex areas of customs procedures, transport and port logistics, harmonization of standards, and simplification of procedures. Trade facilitation reforms require a large volume of technical assistance for national capacity building. To facilitate what these reforms entail and what can be learned from cross-country experiences, the EU and the World Bank organized two workshops in Dhaka (South Asian countries) and Shanghai (East Asian countries) in 2004. Jointly they succeeded in bringing together renowned experts from multilateral organizations, selected bilateral donor community, the private sector, ex civil servants, and scholars. The participants were largely drawn from the relevant government departments and chambers of commerce and industry. This paper summarizes the main presentations in the workshops. It also indicates the areas that need more focus in future events. The paper should serve as a reference document for national policymakers and for future seminars and workshops on trade facilitation. It has also linked the presentations to the ongoing research work on trade facilitation.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS3703 SEP 01, 2005
This publication consists of a set of papers prepared for a Senior Policy Seminar on "Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations in China", held in Dalian China in September 1994.
... See More + Thirty participants from China attended the seminar, including senior representatives from several provincial administrations. They were joined by senior officials from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and by distinguished experts from India, the United States, Germany, and Canada. Comprehensive tax reforms were undertaken in China in January 1994 with a view to broadening the tax base and simplifying the system of tax sharing between central and provincial administrations. The seminar was designed to alert participants from all levels of the Chinese government to the major elements in a strategy for effective intergovernmental fiscal arrangements and to help build consensus for change. This book, which is intended to be of use to policymakers and practitioners, reviews the fundamental principles underlying a system of good intergovernmental fiscal relations; examines the development of the Chinese system of fiscal relations up to and including the reforms of January 1994; evaluates intergovernmental fiscal arrangements in a range of countries (both developed and developing countries) with the purpose of drawing lessons for China; and presents views of Chinese and foreign experts on China's fiscal relations problems. The book's primary focus is on center-state relationships and only briefly addresses state-local relationships.
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This seminar brought together ministers and other senior officials of five middle-income countries form Eastern and Southern Europe which form a part of the World Bank's Europe, Middle East, and North Africa region.
... See More + One of the major points of interest in the seminar was to establish the sense in which centrally planned economies face a fundamentally different set of problems when trying to reform trade policies than do market economies. This summary paper attempts to synthesize the major issues which arose from the seven presentations as well as from the lively discussion from the floor of the seminar which characterized each of its sessions. This is done by reference to the following broad themes: the origins of the need for adjustment; the nature of the necessary adjustments; the role of trade reform in the adjustment process; the special trade reform problems in socialist countries; the policy content of adjustment and the role of devaluation; sequencing and the characteristics of successful trade liberalization; and the international environment for trade reform. On some of these themes there was considerable unanimity of view across the very diverse set of countries whose experiences were recounted. On others, such as whether trade reform is a substantively different problem in socialist as compared to capitalist systems, there were a number of different perspectives which were not reconciled by discussion.
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This paper summarizes a seminar which provides a group of countries with economic adjustment programs, discusses the design of these programs for their own particular circumstances, and compares the perceived and actual difficulties of implementation.
... See More + After a brief introduction, the paper is divided into five further sections. Section II collects certain ideas about the definition of the adjustment and about the assessment of the effects of adjustment programs. Section III discusses the social aspects of economic adjustment programs and the possible need for a more explicit political analysis to support the design and implementation of these programs. Section IV examines the key question of the sustainability of adjustment programs in terms of several major influences on this including the internal consistency or otherwise of domestic policies. Section V relates this question of the sustainability of programs to the constraints coming from the world economic environment. Finally, section VI highlights some of the major concerns about the process of adjustment design in most need of attention. The paper also contains four background papers examining the adjustment experiences of seven countries.
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