A three-pillar National Strategy
The first pillar is trade facilitation. The second is to
enlarge Greece’s export base, as well as the
number of exporters and exported products. The
third pillar is export promotion. The aim is to find
overseas buyers for Greek products, by making a
fresh approach to traditional destinations and
penetrating new emerging markets and networks.
The first stage of initiatives has already been
completed, with the assistance of experts from
the United Nations Economic Commission for
Europe (UNECE), which specializes on Trade
Facilitation-Single Window issues, and the basic
framework for reform has been laid out.
The measures that comprise the corresponding
road map for trade facilitation are designed to
simplify both pre-customs and customs proce-
dures. By encouraging exports and facilitating
cross-border trade for companies based in
Greece, the government is developing two main
actions: it revises the existing procedures and
processes, with the aim of ensuring their rational-
ization and simplification wherever deemed nec-
essary, in order to reduce the time and adminis-
trative cost needed to export, and gradually intro-
duces a single information system, a one-stop-
shop for facilitating exports: the “Single Window”.
These policies and actions are considered to be
absolutely necessary for Greece, which is lagging
far behind other countries. It has been observed
that, on average, only 5% of exports undergo cus-
tom inspections in EU member states, as com-
pared to 40% in Greece.
According to UNECE experts, this is due to the
imperfect operation of the e-customs system, a
dysfunctional risk assessment system and a per-
vasive inspection mentality. Greek technocrats
realized how much this costs in terms of time,
money and transparency, and came up with a
simple export procedure, based on transparency,
the security of transactions and speed, which
simplifies matters, reducing the time to export
from 19 days –of which, 14 are eaten up by
bureaucratic paperwork– to the EU average of
only 10 days. The government aims at achieving
a 1% increase in the value of exports for each day
export processing times are reduced.
Measures for simplifying export
procedures
The strategy for simplifying export procedures
comprises 25 actions – 19 principal and 6 auxil-
iary. The first objective is to reduce the number of
days needed to export by 50% by 2015. More
Trade with Greece
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