One digital document for foreign trade in Belarus

Work is in progress in Belarus to develop a universal digital document for foreign trade operations. The information was released by Pavel Pigal, Third Secretary of the Foreign Trade Regulation Section of the Foreign Trade Policy Office of the Foreign Trade Department of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, on 10 October, BelTA has learned.

According to the Doing Business 2013 report, Belarus improved five ratings out of ten. The Trading Across Borders rating went up from 151 to 154. Work is in progress to further improve the country’s standing in this ranking, remarked Pavel Pigal.

According to the Foreign Ministry representative, the creation of a universal state-run web portal for foreign trade operations will be one of the most important events that will allow considerably improving Belarus’ foreign trade rankings in the Doing Business report in the future. Many countries are working on it or have accomplished it. The reform has been hailed by World Bank experts and has resulted in a massive improvement of the rankings of those countries. Work is now in progress to agree the main parameters, the concept of the project and its future guidelines with interested parties because the project is extremely complicated in its methodological and technical aspects.

Pavel Pigal said that the concept for launching the portal for foreign trade operations was prepared in September. Work is in progress to design a universal digital document for foreign trade operations. The document will be able to replace a considerable number of mandatory documents, which influence Belarus’ rankings now.

The new digital document will allow economic operators to spend less on foreign trade operations since they will no longer have to submit an abundant number of hardcopy documents to various auditing agencies, spending a lot of resources preparing these documents. Apart from that, the document will reduce the time spent on interaction with auditing agencies.

The official also mentioned other areas of efforts meant to improve the foreign trade terms, which are taken into account by the World Bank for preparing the reports. Those are the customs processing of cargoes, cargo transportation and the processing of export and import documents.

Significant reforms were carried out with regard to customs processing during the period the World Bank surveyed to prepare the latest report and the Belarusian side informed the Bank about them. The mandatory presentation of advance electronic information about commodities imported into the Customs Union and Belarus was introduced. According to economic operators, the measure considerably accelerated and simplified border crossing procedures while the World Bank does not record the reform as a significant one due to the methods the Bank uses. Apart from that, the customs service of Belarus intends to arrange automatic registration of customs declarations that will also result in a considerable facilitation of customs procedures. There are plans to modernize information systems for the sake of digital interaction with exporters and importers.

Belarus is working to harmonize technical requirements with requirements of trade partner states for the sake of facilitating several procedural aspects as far as the preparation of documents that accompany cargoes is concerned.

At the same time the Transport and Communications Ministry and Belarusian Railways put efforts into transporting foreign trade cargoes using rapid direct trains. The Foreign Ministry representative remarked that while analyzing the transportation of exports and imports the World Bank records only transportation by automobile transport, which is a rather expensive kind and takes longer than transportation by railroad. Therefore, the cost of transportation and transportation time for Belarus in the Doing Business report are 4-5 days and $1,000-1,300 respectively while transportation by container trains to the Klaipeda port and back takes at most 48 hours and costs about $500. “Therefore, by putting efforts into this direction we plan to considerably improve our ranking,” said Pavel Pigal.

Speaking about the work that has been done so far, the Foreign Ministry representative said: “We hope that it will allow us to improve our rankings in the future although methods of the Doing Business report do not fully reflect the foreign trade improvements that we really get and that economic operators tell us about”. The official said that they work closely with respondents of the World Bank in Belarus and with Belarusian business unions in order to deliver the latest and fullest information about foreign trade terms.