Customs clearance reform facilitates enterprises' logistics

The regional integration of customs clearance reform, under the framework of Belt and Road Initiative, has been underway for two years as of the end of April.

According to the General Administration of Customs, local customs have approved 11.73 million customs declarations over the past two years, among which 9.8 percent are cross-regional.

The General Administration of Customs authorized the Qingdao Customs in East China's Shandong province to take the lead ininitiating the reform, which involves 10 local customs in nine provincial regions, including Shandong, Shaanxi, and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

The purpose of the reform is to build a low-cost and efficient logistics channel for more than 90,000 enterprises along the routes of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The customs clearance involves using paperless, multimodal transport and electronic discharging measures to improve the efficiency and lower the costs for the companies' customs clearance. It is estimated these measures and reforms will reduce the enterprises' comprehensive clearance costs between 20 percent to 40 percent.