Study on the development strategy of international trade based on security and facilitation
Introduction
With multilateral, bilateral and regional cooperation and efforts, a large number of tariff and non-tariff barriers have been gradually weakened, while a series of invisible barriers such as trade regulatory systems and entry/exit procedures have an increasingly prominent impact on trade flows, severely limiting the trade competitiveness of countries or regions. Many international organizations, government agencies and scholars have been exploring efficient customs clearance models since the 1990s, conducting in-depth research and promoting trade facilitation aimed at reducing or removing institutional and technical barriers in the international trade process and reducing transaction costs.
Along with the rapid growth of international trade flows, there are more and more problems such as invasion of foreign organisms, spread of infectious diseases, food safety, genetically modified products, nuclear radiation threats, economic security threats caused by trade barriers, toxic and harmful substances, and information security, which both directly threaten human and social security and affect trade development. Customs, quality inspection, inspection and quarantine and other port management departments are specifically responsible for national import and export trade management, they have an unshirkable responsibility to ensure national security and promote trade development, how to do both to effectively respond to the threat of various non-traditional security factors and to facilitate the development of trade is their urgent need to address the issue.
Trade security and trade facilitation
1. Trade security.
There is no clear definition of trade security in the academic community, and it is mainly explained from two perspectives: state or capacity.
① From the perspective of state, trade security refers to the state in which a country’s foreign trade activities are not threatened or affected by external forces and risks under the condition of economic globalization;
② From the perspective of capacity, trade security refers to a country’s ability to maintain sustainable and healthy development by participating in international competition and international cooperation to make its products more resistant to shocks and risks when facing the impact of various adverse factors at home and abroad.
According to the above explanation, it can be defined as follows: trade security is the state and ability of a country to avoid being affected by many unfavorable factors at home and abroad under the background of economic globalization and regional economic integration, through participation in international competition and international cooperation so as to ensure the sustainable and healthy development of its trade and maintain national security.
Accordingly, we can understand that trade security is to improve a country’s overall ability to participate in international competition to gain benefits, resist various domestic and foreign risks and maintain national security. The fundamental purpose of trade security is to develop and prosper the national economy, improve the country’s economic status in the international arena and raise the level of national welfare; the core is to improve the overall international competitive ability of the country.
With the deepening of world economic integration, international trade and the flow of people entering and leaving the country more and more frequent, trade security issues have become the focus of attention of customs, quality inspection, inspection and quarantine and other port management departments. Non-traditional threats have strong concealment and uncertainty, their actors have diversity, the threat range beyond the traditional military warfare field, the level of impact across the national regional level, the law of activity is difficult to grasp, obviously different from the traditional security threats. China’s trade currently faces non-traditional security threats, mainly in the following three areas.
The first is the threat to life and health, mainly refers to the spread of infectious diseases. Infectious diseases bring great harm to human life and health, is a terrible, not easy to control the disaster that threatens human life, with a rapid rate of spread, a wide range of impact, social harm and other characteristics.
The second is ecological security threats, including invasive alien organisms, food safety, genetically modified products, nuclear radiation, pollutants, etc. Invasion of exotic organisms is one of the biggest security threats to the ecosystem, and human activities such as trade, tourism and other entry and exit activities are the main ways. Once the invasion of exotic organisms is successful, it is difficult to control the outbreak, which will cause long-term and irreversible damage, forming dominant populations that endanger the survival of local species and cause serious impacts on national agricultural production, international trade, ecosystems and even human and animal health.
The third is the threat to economic security, mainly in the importing countries set intellectual property rights, technical barriers and green barriers and other non-tariff barriers. The current global trade growth is weak, the foreign trade situation is complex and severe, some developed countries in order to get out of the crisis and the implementation of trade restrictive measures, in the market access to technical trade measures, labor standards, green barriers and other aspects of increasingly stringent requirements, production and export of goods to further increase the difficulty, the serious damage to enterprises. Technical trade measures are considered to be the main obstacles encountered by enterprises in exports after the exchange rate.
2. Trade Facilitation.
Trade facilitation is a current hot topic, and numerous government agencies and NGOs, such as APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), WTO (World Trade Organization) and other international organizations have conducted studies on it, but so far there is still no uniform definition. Although the focus of these definitions are different, but the basic spirit is the same, the core is to simplify and coordinate the entry and exit formalities and procedures in international trade, to speed up the cross-border flow of factors.
3. The relationship between trade security and facilitation.
Trade security and facilitation reflect the inherent laws in the process of global trade cooperation and development. They are a unified pair of contradictions, logically contradictory and conflicting, but harmonious and integrated in terms of value objectives.
Logically speaking, in order to promote trade facilitation and speed up the clearance of elements, it is inevitable to require the relaxation of the control of inbound and outbound elements, simplify the procedures and procedures related to inbound and outbound, and reduce the intervention of the port management on the inbound and outbound links; and in order to ensure trade security, it is necessary to strengthen the inspection and management of the circulation process, not to omit the trade management measures that may affect the speed of clearance of elements, but also must pay attention to the trade The process of tracking and security, and with the security situation changes, trade management measures may be upgraded at any time.
This means that if excessive emphasis on convenience, it may bring security to hidden dangers; if excessive emphasis on trade security may affect the normal trade facilitation. From the perspective of economic value, due to non-traditional security factors can bring serious threats to the security of goods and gates, importers and exporters, port management, etc. must increase the cost of measures to ensure security; otherwise, suffer greater losses.
Based on security and facilitation of the four international trade development strategies
In order to facilitate the analysis, “security” and “convenience” are used as the horizontal and vertical axes and establish a two-dimensional coordinate chart (Figure 1), as follows. The horizontal axis direction is from left to right to enhance trade security, and the vertical axis direction is from bottom to top to increase the degree of convenience.
The first: efficient, corresponding to a high degree of compliance with low law enforcement management costs and compliance costs, not only the port department in the supervision and management of entry and exit to achieve a balance of management costs and benefits, but also to achieve low compliance costs and high compliance benefits for inbound and outbound enterprises, to achieve a high degree of unity of trade security and facilitation, to achieve the goals pursued by port management.
The second: control type, corresponding to the high degree of compliance, high law enforcement costs and compliance costs, although the high degree of compliance “security” is one of the goals we pursue, but it is high compliance costs and law enforcement costs “inconvenience” as the price, high cost, so it is inefficient Therefore, it is one of the inefficient types.
The third type: ineffective, corresponding to the low degree of compliance, high enforcement costs and compliance costs, obviously not the goal we are pursuing, so it is ineffective.
The fourth type: relaxed, corresponding to the low degree of compliance, low law enforcement costs and compliance costs, low law enforcement costs and compliance costs “facilitation” is certainly one of the goals we pursue, but at the expense of high compliance “security” for the cost, so the inefficient type of two.
At present, China is promoting a new round of opening up to the outside world, to open up for reform and development, to achieve a win-win interaction between openness and reform, which requires the management of inbound and outbound ports in the first quadrant of high efficiency to the upper right, to promote trade facilitation strategy to ensure safety, to achieve a high degree of unity between trade security and facilitation.
Suggestions for China’s port management
With the development of global economic integration and free trade, the tariff collection function of the port management department has a tendency to weaken, while the scope of responsibilities in the prevention of unconventional threats and other aspects is expanding, and gradually began to take on national macro-control tasks such as promoting trade development, promoting tourism and investment. That is to say, the port management door needs to continue to better for the country’s gate-keeping, law enforcement functions at the same time, to further deepen the sense of service, take a variety of means to effectively promote trade facilitation.
First, trade security is an important part of national economic security, must be subordinated to the overall interests of national economic security; at the same time, national trade security is the basis of national economic security, related to China’s global political and economic status and the overall national security, so trade security issues must be incorporated into the national security strategy level. This requires the port management department must be “big security concept” as a guide, give full play to the security maintenance function, directly kill the threat to life and health, ecological security threats and other non-traditional security threats at the border, to cut off its propagation path.
Second, with information technology as a grip, vigorously promote the electronic port and the electronic port-based “single window” construction, promote collaborative law enforcement, joint inspection “one-stop operation”, integration of customs clearance, inspection, examination, eliminating the international trade supply chain Unnecessary duplication and delay, to achieve “one declaration, one inspection, one release”.
Third, strengthen cross-regional, interdepartmental, cross-border cooperation, the formation of certification standards and mutual recognition of certification results and risk cargo information exchange, mutual recognition of supervision, mutual assistance in law enforcement and other comprehensive, multi-level interoperability, to achieve the goal of “customs clearance”. The port department can also improve the assessment system, optimize the assessment methods, control information asymmetry and other ways to comply with the law and safety certification of enterprises, to give its AEO convenience, to combat violations in the supply chain, forming a win-win cooperation between customs and enterprises.
Fourth, further strengthen China’s TBT Agreement Agreement Committee in the WTO, the SPS Agreement Committee and other institutions related to the work of multi-level multilateral and bilateral international cooperation top-level design, and further play the professional and technical support functions of industry associations, enterprises and technical service centers for import and export commodities; build an early warning system for technical trade measures and a multi-body linkage coordination response mechanism to collect trade target countries’ Technical trade measures information to solve the problem of information asymmetry, assist enterprises in technology development and transformation, strengthen the communication and coordination between damaged enterprises, industry associations, government lines and form a joint effort to negotiate with the target countries to protect trade interests; participate in ISO and other standard-setting bodies related activities, and actively strive for the dominance of international standard-setting projects and the right to speak in the international market; learn from European and American standard-setting.
We will learn from the standard-setting models of European and American countries, reform the domestic standard-setting model, optimize the “public-private partnership” of standard-setting bodies, and strive to achieve a balance between equity and efficiency.
