Administrative and non-tariff barriers impede trade on its "silk road"

Administrative and non-tariff barriers impede trade on the silk road. This was the
conclusion during the 3rd International Silk Road Businessmen Summit held in
Trabzon, Turkey under the coordination of the Ministry of Economy of Turkey.  21
countries were represented in the forum. BCCI's President Tsvetan Simeonov also
attended the forum at the invitation of Trabzon Chamber of Commerce, the
Association of Exporters from the Black Sea region and the Embassy of Turkey to
Bulgaria. He joined the "Logistics" discussion panel.

  The "Logistics" panel presented some results from an experimental tour of a convoy
of trucks of the Central Asian republics showing that about 35% of their time was
lost in downtime and that nearly the same (34.8%) cost of transport was spent on
official checkings and passing through customs procedures. Existence of corruption
was mentioned as well.

  Some data were presented to the forum stating that 80% of the goods being
transported to Bulgaria were carried by Bulgarian transport companies which is
probably due to the better correlation between price and quality.

  According to the participants of the forum, Turkey's efforts to raise these issues
to discussion deserve the serious considerations also by other governments on the
"silk road".

  Tsvetan Simeonov informed about some interesting initiatives of the BCCI, such as
the Guide on border crossing. He presented the benefits of using standard GS1
logistics labels in transport and logistics, whereas some of the information is
encoded with a barcode, which facilitates traceability of goods and consignments.
By the use of new technologies, information on goods comes in parallel with their
physical flow, thus reducing the influence of the subjective factor and limiting
the cases of corrupt practices.