Baku, Azerbaijan, June 14
By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:
One of the main reasons for the discrepancy in the statistical indicators of trade turnover with the trading partners of Azerbaijan is a different approach to statistical accounting, Head of the Department of Organization and Analysis of Customs Statistics of the Main Department of Activity Evaluation and Development Programs of the State Customs Committee (SCC) Azizaga Akhmedov told Trend.
He noted that, in this case, the reason is that the exporting country takes the exporting goods it into account in its export statistics, regardless of the country of origin of products, and the importing country records products in the column of imports from the producing country.
"This is happening everywhere. That is, if we receive a car from Georgia of German production, then Georgia inputs the value of this car to its exports, and Azerbaijan - to imports from Germany. Such inconsistencies are normal," Akhmedov said.
But at the same time, according to Akhmedov, there are also times when the cause of inconsistencies are errors in the preparation of documents.
"There are four codes for countries in the customs declaration – for the country-manufacturer, country-merchant, the sending country and the destination country. Sometimes it happens that one of these codes is wrong. Also an error sometimes is committed in specifying the product code. In such cases, we hold meetings with representatives of the customs authorities of our trade partners in order to identify and correct inconsistencies," Akhmedov said.
According to the data of the State Customs Committee, in January-April Azerbaijan exported 1,936 types of goods and imported 6,401 types of goods. Azerbaijan's foreign trade partners are 153 countries. During the reporting period, in total, 8 979 legal entities and individuals (4,335 legal and 4,644 physical persons) were engaged in foreign trade activities.
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