Don’t miss one of the most i teresting events of the year, AICE 2018 in Dubai April 30th to May 1st.
Prosperity, goes much beyond mere economic growth, and ensures inclusive, sustainable development of a society, by addressing the needs and expectations of all key stakeholders. Economic policy should be designed to be inclusive and offer welfare benefits and chances for higher income and well being to all members of the society.
With a view to offer ways for such equal and shared prosperity, the World FZO shall focus on three specific themes as follows during the fourth Annual International Conference and Exhibition 2018 (AICE 2018).
Introduction video to the event: (click here).
The container traffic from India to Russia through the territory of Iran and Azerbaijan along the route of the International North-South Transport Corridor will be opened early next year, while there will be a protocol on the green channel for the transportation of goods on the land segment from Iran to Russia. The First Deputy head of the Federal Customs Service, Vice-Chairman of the Council of the World Customs Organization (WCO), Ruslan Davydov, told Vestnik Kavkaza about the work of the customs channel between Russia, Azerbaijan and Iran.
Ruslan Davydov explained that the green channel from Iran to Russia through the territory of Azerbaijan will act in accordance with the standards of the World Customs Organization. “There is such a concept in the World Customs Organization as coordinated border management (CBM), which is quite applicable to the International North-South Transport Corridor. “The point is that the goods always have two points of movement. For example, the goods that go from Iran to Russia. When they leave the country of export, their parameters are registered at the Iranian customs: the product code, the cost of export, weight and other data that we would like to receive from the Iranian customs online,” he said.
Thus, the customs green channel will ensure maximum transparency and speed of cargo passing through the borders of states within the international transport corridor. “If we adjust the work in the way that our automated systems, when declaring imported goods, will compare the data of Iran’s customs officials with our data and they will coincide, this will significantly speed up the passage of customs,” the First Deputy head of the Federal Customs Service stressed.
“If the data of Iranian and Russian customs coincide, the risk system does not work, the goods are allowed up to domestic consumption, that is, everything happens quickly. If the data does not coincide for some reason, then the cargo is checked. “The check is carried out either as a request for documents and information about the goods, either in the form of scanning at the inspection and inspection complex, or the cargo inspection,” Ruslan Davydov added.
The International North-South Transport Corridor, which currently stretches from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Persian Gulf to Russia, Eurasia and Europe, will cut down the time of cargo transportationby half – to about 17 days from the earlier 35 days,
How big is Africa, really? A few years back there was an exhibition in a London gallery by the Royal Geographic Society, and the curator asked the edge.org group to contribute “unusual maps”. Thinking it would be for a few hundred people at most, I put together a little map that I had made previously in the mid 80s before, then as an example of scientific visualization graphics software (which I spent a decade on, actually).
It was a very simple premise that I had seen done a number of times before – never claimed it to be a novel invention – but had a slightly new twist in mind: Africa is so mind-numbingly immense, that it exceeds the common assumptions by just about anyone I ever met: it contains the entirety of the USA, all of China, India, as well as Japan and pretty much all of Europe as well – all combined !
And the idea was to roughly put all of them as puzzle pieces somehow fitting inside the outline shape of Africa, which is of course just a symbolic image – it may as well have been just blobs to tell the story, but it actually worked pretty well with the real pieces, at least enough to get the idea across in a visual and visceral way.
The whole point being made was that we all have been taught geography mainly based on the Mercator projection – as the background in daily television news, the cover of my school atlas, in general the ubiquitous depiction of the planet.
But the basic fact is that a three-dimensional sphere being shown as a single two-dimensional flat image will always be subject to a conversion loss: something has to give…
The reason why Mercator was such an important advance is simple: on it one can draw straight lines to account for travel routes – in the days of the gigantic merchant fleets and naval battles an immensely valuable attribute.
But that ability to use lines instead of curves came at a cost: areas near the poles would be greatly exaggerated. Greenland looks deceivingly as if it were the size of all of South America for instance…
In other words: if things are normal near the equator, everything further north and south is familiar to us in a stretched and enlarged version, veering further and further away from the proper size. And conversely: if we kept the shapes as we intuitively know them now, Africa ought to be stretched massively larger to keep it in true proportion.
Hence the fact that in everyday thinking, Africa is just about always hugely underestimated – even by college grads, off by factor of 2 or 3.
You must be logged in to post a comment.