Explore the vast range of titles available.

Central Asia is often associated with the silk route or road, the longest overland trade route connecting China to Europe and one of the oldest in history. Growth opportunities and the future prosperity of the region are highly dependent upon the efficiency of its internal and external supply-chain connections, which is the focus of this report. Supply-chain connectivity depends on the quality of the infrastructure on specific routes. This study explains how supply chain fragmentation remains a serious obstacle to economic development of Central Asia and to Eurasian integration more generally. It provides a comprehensive assessment of the various factors that yet impede supply-chain integration, including weak transport and communications infrastructure, but as important, and perhaps more so, critical weaknesses in policy, institutions, and governance. Based on this assessment this report provides an insightful set of recommendations that, if taken up by the governments of Central Asia and by their key neighbors, will go a long way in promoting the effective integration of Central Asia into an increasingly connected Eurasian continental economy and with that into the global economy.

This paper is organized as follows. In chapter two, Samson Bilangna and Marcellin Djeuwo from the Cameroon customs administration present the history and the outcomes of the performance measurement policy launched by their administra-tion: the General Directorate of Customs signed 'performance contracts' with the frontline customs officers in 2010 and with some importers in 2011. In chapter three, Jose-Maria Munoz, an anthropologist, offers a complementary view of the introduction of figures in the Cameroon tax administration. The fourth chapter ends the book's first part, which focuses on performance measurement. Xavier Pascual from the French customs administration describes the system implemented by his administration to measure the collective performance of customs units and bureaus. In chapter five, Anne-Marie Geourjon and Bertrand Laporte, who are both economists, and Ousmane Coundoul and Massene Gadiaga, who are from the Senegalese customs administration, present the use of data mining to select imports for inspection. This project is being developed in Senegal and embodies the concept of risk analysis. Sharing the same global aim to make controls more efficient, economists Gael Raballand and Guillermo Arenas from the World Bank and anthropologist Thomas Cantens from the World Customs Organization suggest, in chapter six, using mirror statistics to detect potentially fraudulent import flows. Mirror statistics calculate the gaps of foreign trade statistics between two trading partner countries. To conclude the second part on the integration of measurement in information systems, Soyoung Yang from the Korea Customs Service (KCS), in chapter eight, offers a case study on KCS's implementation of a single window system. With respect to risk analysis, the concept of single window is widespread in the trade and customs environments, but few concrete achievements have been presented and analyzed.

Natural rubber is mainly dependent on import in China, its domestic market price is influenced by the Natural Rubber Customs Declaration Price (NRCDP). Considering the fluctuating properties of the NRCDP, a method of the NRCDP based on Wavelet and the optimized Back Propagation (BP) neural network Group using a Genetic Algorithm (W-GA-BPG) is proposed. First, an NRCDP dataset is established based on the original Customs Declaration Price (CDP) dataset collected by Qingdao Customs, in which the commodity types are selected consistently according to the sampling intervals, and the features are deleted if they are less affected by the fluctuation of NRCDP. Secondly, the selected features in NRCDP are decomposed using wavelet transform to obtain a group of feature sequences with different scales. Then, a Group of BP neural networks (BPG) optimized by Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to predict multiple decomposition sub-sequences, respectively. Finally, the predicted values are obtained through wavelet reconstruction. Combined with the NRCDP dataset, the W-GA-BPG model is established by comparing and analyzing experiments by evaluating the Mean Square Error (MSE) and determination coefficient of the prediction results. The MSE and determination coefficient predicted using the proposed model are 0.0043 and 0.9302, respectively, which is the best prediction effect.

PurposeThis study examines the impact of raising the ceiling value of Electronic Commerce Custom Declarations (ECCD) on Turkey's export performance processed via ECCD during the COVID-19 period.Design/methodology/approachThis paper examines the impact of the pandemic conditions on Cross-Border Electronic Commerce (ECCD) exports from Turkey to 47 countries over 42 months before and during the pandemic. An empirical analysis using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) and Mean Group (MG), Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach was conducted to identify the factors affecting export flows.FindingsThe findings suggest that raising the ceiling of the ECCD trade is a vital factor in increasing exports. and this result is robust after controlling for pandemic conditions. On the other hand, although the COVID-19 shock mitigates the export volume of ECCD in the short run, it changes by reversal and increases the export level in the long run. Additionally, the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Turkey have a significant and negative impact on export flows in the short run, while they have a positive and significant effect in the long run.Practical implicationsThe results of this study have practical implications for policymakers, emphasizing the potential and significance of Cross-Border E-Commerce (CBEC) trade.Originality/valueThe study is a pioneering effort in the literature of CBEC to explore how changes in the upper limit on customs declarations can affect export flows, taking into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 has not only dramatically affected the ordinary course of social life, but also caused an idiosyncratic downturn in the global economy and created multidimensional effects on international trade and Cross-Border E-Commerce merchandise flows. This paper provides unique empirical evidence of how the consequences of the pandemic have distinctively diverged on conventional and simplified customs clearance, which includes Cross-Border E-Commerce orders, differed significantly. The Difference-in-differences (DiD) and Causal Inference estimates for the 2019:01-2021:06 interval suggest that simplified customs clearance shows more resilience to COVID-19 effects relative to conventional customs clearance and reduces the negative impact of COVID-19 influences on export performance in the case of Turkey. The fundamental outcomes remain consistent when the sample includes emerging markets and when the analysis employs the export of consumer goods as opposed to total exports in the conventional mode. Overall, the findings highlight the significant role of E-Commerce and simplified customs processes in enhancing export performance.

Since 1997, China has devoted considerable resources to information and communications technology (ICT) development. China has the world's largest telecommunications market, and its information technology industry has been an engine of economic growth—growing two to three times faster than GDP over the past 10 years. E-government initiatives have achieved significant results, and the private sector has increasingly used ICT for production and service processes, internal management, and online transactions. The approaching 10-year mark provides an excellent opportunity to update the policy to reflect the evolving needs of China's economy. These needs include the challenges posed by industrialization, urbanization, upgraded consumption, and social mobility. Developing a more effective ICT strategy will help China to achieve its economic and social goals. Addressing all the critical factors is complex and requires long-term commitment. This book highlights several key issues that need to be addressed decisively in the second half of this decade, through policies entailing institutional reform, to trigger broader changes. This books is the result of 10 months of strategic research by a World Bank team at the request of China's State Council Informatization Office and the Advisory Committee for State Informatization. Drawing on background papers by Chinese researchers, the study provides a variety of domestic perspectives and local case studies and combines these perspectives with international experiences on how similar issues may have been addressed in other countries.

Doing business 2008 is the fifth in a series of annual reports investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Doing business presents quantitative indicators on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 178 economies, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and over time. Regulations affecting 10 stages of a business's life are measured: starting a business, dealing with licenses, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and closing a business. Data in doing business 2008 are current as of June 1, 2007. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where, and why. The Doing business methodology has limitations. Other areas important to business-such as a country's proximity to large markets, the quality of its infrastructure services, the security of property from theft and looting, the transparency of government procurement, macroeconomic conditions or the underlying strength of institutions-are not studied directly by doing business. To make the data comparable across countries, the indicators refer to a specific type of business-generally a limited liability company operating in the largest business city.

This article argues that the (Western-oriented) right to religion has been proven inadequate in protecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights. It recognizes that this is partly because of the distinctive characteristics of Indigenous religions, which differ from other dominant religions, but also because of the way in which religion has been used by colonialism with dramatic effects on Indigenous Peoples and their beliefs, spiritualities, and worldviews. The article focuses on Latin America to argue further that in addition to colonialism, the early Constitutions also attacked Indigenous religions. As Indigenous rights are more acknowledged in Latin America, we take this region as an excellent, albeit painful, example of how Indigenous religions have been pushed aside even in the most positive contexts. The article uses the constitutional and legal arrangements in Latin American states, mainly Ecuador and Bolivia, to critically assess the protection that these favorable to Indigenous Peoples legal systems’ guarantee to Indigenous rights despite a persistent implementation gap. Also, this article highlights the weaknesses of the international system in mitigating the manifold threats that Indigenous Peoples have to face on a daily basis in their struggle to maintain and transmit their religions and spirituality, including the assault of other religions and sects into their communities and the so-called neo-extractivism. The article finally draws some concluding remarks and recommendations on how to improve the freedom of and violations from religion(s) of Indigenous Peoples in the context of Latin America as well as international law more broadly.

A marked feature of the contemporary U.S. constitutional landscape is the campaign by an Evangelical-Catholic coalition against the idea of secularism, understood by this alliance to mean the exclusion of religion from the state and its progressive marginalization from social life. Departing from the tendency to treat this project as a national phenomenon, this article places it within a longer global genealogy of an earlier international Christian ecumenical effort to combat secularism. The triumph of that campaign culminated in the making of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, now considered the paradigmatic international legal provision on religious liberty. Article 18’s protection of the rights to proselytize and convert, I argue, was a product of an impassioned contestation between an ecumenical movement keen on securing the prerogative to spread the gospel to the non-Christian world and a secularism in a strange alliance with Islam in the region that held the greatest promise for the evangelical enterprise—Muslim Africa. In excavating the genealogy of ecumenical thought as it developed a critique of the so-called secularist threat, I recover the delicate links between the contemporary U.S. anti-secular campaign and the earlier ecumenical efforts.