Geneva, 17 March 1999
ECE/TRADE/99/4
COUNTRIES MEET
AT GENEVA TO DISCUSS TRADE FACILITATION AND ELECTRONIC BUSINESS
One hundred and fifty
participants from nearly 50 countries attended Monday
15 March the international Seminar on Trade Facilitation and
Electronic Business organized by UN/CEFACT, the United Nations
Centre for the Facilitation of Procedures and Practices for
Administration, Commerce and Transport. The Seminar addressed
major issues in trade facilitation and the implications for
international trade of the rapid development of electronic
commerce and various other new technologies.
Benefits and challenges related
to implementing UN/EDIFACT, the UN standard for electronic
data interchange (EDI), were illustrated by the French
multinational company Casino. EDI allows companies to exchange
trade and other structured data between computers and
applications. Casino is in the supermarket business and is using
EDI to automate its purchasing, logistics and financial
transactions with its suppliers. A high percentage of its current
6,000 suppliers are already using the UN/EDIFACT standard and the
remainder are expected to be doing so by the year 2002.
One of the highlights of the
Seminar was the presentation by the World Customs Organization of
the revision of the Kyoto Convention which defines Customs
organizations= significant role in trade facilitation
and is of great importance for simple and effective trade
procedures. Corruption in trade and some projects for combating
it were also discussed.
Delegations from Finland, the
Netherlands and the Islamic Republic of Iran described
interesting success stories based on the added value of
electronic commerce networks.
UN/CEFACT is constantly
investigating ways and means to improve the quality and scope of
trade facilitation tools. To that effect, the Seminar heard
several presentations on new techniques, such as Extensible
Markup Language (XML), Simpl-EDI and Object-oriented EDI, and the
use of the Internet in international trade. Simpl-EDI is an
effort to adopt traditional EDI to small and medium-sized
enterprises. XML is a standard for creating forms that can be
filled in on a computer screen and is promising for facilitating
electronic commerce on the Internet. Object-oriented EDI is being
developed as the basis of the next generation of EDI.
The Seminar was chaired by Mr.
Henri Martre, Chairman of UN/CEFACT and President of AFNOR, the
French national standards organization. Mr. Martre was previously
Chief Executive Officer of Aérospatiale.
For further information,
please contact:
Hans Hansell, Chief,
UN/CEFACT secretariat
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
CH - 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Tel: (+41 22) 917 24 57
Fax: (+41 22) 917 00 37
E-mail: [email protected]