Press Release ECE/TRADE/00/3
Geneva, 4 April 2000
Trade facilitation and electronic business: a greater
impact on world trade than WTO
negotiations
"Trade
facilitation and electronic business will have in coming years a much greater impact on
the increase of world trade than many of the negotiations which take place in the World
Trade Organization (WTO)", says Mr. Ray Walker,
Vice Chairman of the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic
Business (UN/CEFACT) which just met in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations
Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE). "WTO negotiations try to solve specific
issues and this can lead to antagonistic views. The work of UN/CEFACT in trade
facilitation and electronic business is more process driven. Experts from enterprises come
together to make things easier for international trade, not to fight against each other.
That is why in the long run it will pay off."
Concluding a very successful annual
session Henri Martre, the Chairman of UN/CEFACT and the
former CEO of Aerospatiale said, "The advantage of working in the UN is first that it
allows all countries to contribute to the work and build on the expertise we have
accumulated over many years, second UN/CEFACT’s unique position allows both
governments and industry to participate on an equal basis in the work. Consequently, it
gives our products a very wide scope of application, and encourages the development of
solutions that can be applied by all to advance world trade."
The Annual Session made important progress
on several Trade Facilitation Recommendations and approved new versions of Recommendation
No. 5 - Abbreviations of INCOTERMS and Recommendation No. 24 - Harmonization of Transport
Status Codes.
More than 1,000 experts from governments
and industry meet regularly during the year, in the framework of the six UN/CEFACT groups,
to develop common procedures for facilitating business and elaborating standard languages
and rules for electronic business. "If the private sector were not certain that the
UN/CEFACT system was cost effective, you can be sure that they would never waste a penny
on these meetings", says Mr. Pierre Georget of Gencode-EAN France and the Chairman of UN/EDIFACT, the main group dealing with
standardization of electronic messages. "It has been estimated that for the French
fast moving industries, UN/EDIFACT has reduced the cost by 4 billion US dollars, 0.5%
of their turnover." UN/EDIFACT is now used by more than 500,000 enterprises,
administrations and organizations throughout the world and this is expected to grow to
over 3 million by 2003.
"With the development of a new
language ebXML (Electronic Business eXtensible Mark-up Language) fully compatible with the
Internet and the world wide web, it can be expected that E.B. will be affordable for small
and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries as well as in developed
countries", says Mr. Khan from India
and a member of CEFACT’s Steering Group, "we don’t want to be left aside in
this unique development". ebXML will build on the experience gained in developing
EDIFACT messages and is being developed in cooperation with OASIS whose members include
such big software enterprises as SUN, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft…
For more information, please contact:
Hans Armfelt Hansell
Deputy Director, Trade Division
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]
Web site: http://www.unece.org/cefact
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Tel: +(41 22) 917 44 44, Fax: +(41 22) 917
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Thank you. |