CROWD ELEVATOR

Недавно я побывала в Баткене и вдохновилась тем, как некоторые люди, стремясь к лучшей жизни и имея предпринимательский дух начинают создавать свой бизнес и, тем самым способствуют развитию своей местности. 47-летняя Жолболдуева Гульнара Токтобаевна известная в городе Баткен женщина-бизнесмен. Гульнару эже знают практически все в Баткене и за его пределами. Иностранные туристы и сотрудники международных, государственных организаций останавливаются у нее в гостинице «Алтын-Бешик » . Гостиница открылась 10 лет назад, в октябре 2006 года. Из-за большого количества гостей в доме Гульнары эже ее дети предложили написать снаружи дома «гостиница». Толчком послужил еще и тот факт, что приехали гости из Бишкека и остановились у нее, у которой на тот момент еще не была сформирована гостиница. Они предложили улучшить условия проживания, поставить кровати и протянуть в дом канализацию. Она последовала их советам. Открылась гостиница с одним санузлом на 5 коек. Далее люди начали с...

Kyrgyz Republic has its IP system since 1993 and the competent authority for it, is a State Service of IP and Innovation under the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyzpatent). The country is a member of 70 multilateral international agreements in the area of IP, that are Paris and Berne Conventions, Madrid Agreement concerning the International Registration Marks, Patent Cooperation Treaty, TRIPS, Singapore Treaty on the Law of Trademark and others. After the collapse in 1991, production of textiles haven’t recovered fully. The need in huge investment in capital in this area and high competition of lower priced textiles from China did not allow the country to recover its textile industry after KR gained its independence and pursued a market economy. Thus, textiles and thread are now mainly supplied by importers, mainly from China. Despite the dying textile industry in Kyrgyzstan, the production of garment has been increasing for the past decade. While small portion of garme...

Tariff Classification is one of the main areas of Customs Law and is crucial when imposing customs duties. Specific rules on classification can be found in HS Convention to which almost all the WTO Members (except Taipei) are party. HS consists of over 5000 commodity groups with a six-digit code. HS consists of:  (1) Chapter, Heading and Sub-heading Notes; and  (2) General Rules for the Interpretation (GIR) of the Harmonized System.  The first one which is Chapter, Heading and Subheading Notes is the main step to identify the product classification.  The second part, GIR provide certain principles to classify goods:  (i) incomplete or unfinished goods if they don’t have a proper line are classified as finished goods; (ii) when goods are prima facie classifiable under two or more headings, classification shall be effected as follows. (a) A heading that provides a more specific description is to preferred to the more general description; (b) mixtures, c...

Trade facilitation (TF)* deals with issues such as border infrastructure, customs procedures, non-tariff measures and other. In particular, the shipment process faces four types of procedures: commercial, transport, regulatory and financial. Each process can in turn increase the overall trade cost as it is delayed due to complicated non-transparent and sometimes costly procedures. Even worse is when such delays on every step happen chronically. This increases the costs so much that the firms become less competitive and may decide to slow down the trade flows. How does trade facilitation work in practice? Well, long delays at the border cause extra costs for the business in terms of losing a customer for future orders. The products might not arrive on time and the customer might not need it anymore or will reduce the price for the goods. If the goods being shipped are agricultural and/or perishable, they simply might not stay as fresh as they are and their value in terms of price pa...

Today I will start a series of articles about the World Trade Organization (WTO) based on my notes. I hope this will shed some light to those readers who know little about this particular organization and the world trade as a whole. The history of WTO starts after the World War II when along with other organizations, such as International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), International Trade Organization was about to be created, but instead a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was signed. So, GATT was signed by 23 nations in Geneva in 1947 and came in force on 1 January 1948. GATT was a de facto International Organization. WTO came into force on 1 January 1995. The WTO Secretariat is in Geneva, Switzerland and is headed by Director General. In total GATT/WTO held 9 negotiation rounds from 1947 to 1994. The main objective of negotiation rounds is to decrease trade barriers among the WTO Members. In chronological order those rounds are: 1) Geneva - April 1947 ...

Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan is an emerging union that is gaining more actuality and relevance in the post-Soviet territory with joining of additional countries as Armenia and Kyrgyz Republic. While it was seen as another not effective project of post-Soviet Union, it appeared to be a new-style project bringing tangible gain to its members and becoming a center of attention in the neighborhood and a viable alternative to the EU (Dragneva and Wolczuk, 2015). While some Central Asian countries as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyz Republic have been analyzing their costs and benefits by joining the EAEU, Caucasian countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) have been planning to join the EU.  Armenia is a small landlocked former Soviet Union country with population of around 3 million people. With an estimated per-capita GDP of US$ 3,619, Armenia is a lower middle-income country. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Armenia experienced a difficult...

Recently Institute of Public Policy and Administration of University of Central Asia (IPPA-UCA) and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) launched the online mapping tool named Kyrgyzstan Spatial (www.kyrgyzstanspatial.org). This application tool is a good way to see the socio-economic and food security situation in Kyrgyzstan. One may view the data on the map and see the regional differences in different sectors on national and sub-national level across time. 

 "Чисто не там, где убирают, а там, где не сорят" Каждый день я наблюдаю как мусороуборочная машина забирает кучу скопившегося за сутки мусора с нашего двора. В выходные дни мусора обычно больше, а в праздничные, так это просто тихий ужас. Общество и СМИ постоянно критикуют то наше "уважаемое" правительство, то депутатов, то порой и Президента страны за то, что сами же можем и контролировать. Казалось бы, на сколько чище было бы жить, если бы каждая семья сортировала мусор на органический и неорганический прежде чем выбросить его в мусорный бак. Но мышление и культуру народа не так легко поменять. Человека, бросающего все в одну корзину довольно сложно заставить потратить дополнительное время, чтобы раскидывать мусор по разным корзинам, ровно как и того, который привык его разделять. Всему есть цена. При установлении какой суммы выплат (административных штрафов) возможно заставить человека поменять свои привычки по культуре сортирования мусора? Сколько же ...

Globalization has always been a topic of hot debates. As from Kyrgyzstan’s perspective, I think that globalization here may have had a twofold effect. While the membership in World Trade Organization (WTO) has had some benefits, the dilemma for today is about the costs and benefits for Kyrgyzstan after its possible accession to the Customs Union (CU), consisting of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russian Federation. It is the most recent trade policy change in the region of Central Asia. Whether joining the CU will be a further step for Kyrgyzstan to better integrate into the global economy or will derive from globalization creating protectionist regional economic block is a matter of time. Kyrgyzstan is one of the five Central Asian post-Soviet countries. Since the collapse of the USSR and after gaining its independence, Kyrgyzstan actively started to integrate into the global economy by signing the bilateral agreements with countries and becoming a member of several preferential trade ...

With the recent abrupt devaluation of Kazakh tenge by 20 % in a few days and devaluation of Kyrgyz som I've become curious about the situation with the other currencies in emerging markets. It looks like Kazakhstan and Turkey are importing gold to keep its currencies from devaluation. It turns out some of the emerging market currencies are sliding against the dollar as well. That is, Argentinian peso devalued by 15%; Turkish lira immersed; currencies of South Africa, Brazil, Russia and many others have come under the pressure. On my personal example working with some different currencies I have noticed the change. Last year I've recorded that $1 equals to 50 afs (afghani) and this year $1 costs 56 afs. Looks like not only Kyrgyz currency and the currency of our neighbor Kazkhstan are sliding down. Weakening of Kyrgyz som is also evident as it is mainly tied to the Russian ruble, comments the National Bank of Kyrgyz Republic. While the situation with our domestic currency...

Кажется, что все вокруг сегодня говорят о биткоине, о его внезапном росте и об упущенных возможностях закупиться ими в свое время. Биткоин - это так называемая криптовалюта, представляющая собой программный код. Другими словами - это электронные деньги. Данная система была создана в 2009 году. С тех пор эта цифровая валюта стала настолько популярной, что на 28 января 2014 года курс 1 биткоина составляет порядка 800 долларов США! Биткоины могут использоваться в различных электронных финансовых операциях, начиная с таких как приобритение товаров в электронных магазинах и заканчивая обменом биткоинов на реальные деньги. Несмотря на то, что операции с виртуальной валютой подвергаются постоянной критике и обвиняются в спонсировании террористических операций, данная "цифровая валюта" не контролируется никаким государством и не поддерживается никаким центробанком. Неудивительно, что центробанки различных стран не сходятся во мнении по отношению к данной системе. Так, Банк ...

In the World Bank and IFC Doing Business Report 2014 , Kyrgyzstan is on the 68th place out of 189 in the rankings on the ease of doing business. For comparison, Kyrgyzstan went up on two positions and was on the 70th place last year.  Kyrgyzstan's good practice is that it is making it easy to obtain an electricity connection. On the first lines of ranking are Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, China, New Zealand, United States, Denmark. Last one in the ranking is Chad. Central Asia is continuing its steady pace of regulatory reform. However, Central Asian countries are spread across the ranking. That is, Kazakhstan is on the 50th place, Tajikistan on 143rd and Uzbekistan is on 146th. Russia this year is on 92nd place, went up on twenty positions since last year. This ranking Ease of doing business is based on various criteria and indicators. Among them are: starting a business, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading ac...

Recently, I came across the SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) yearbook. It's a thick 700+ pages yearbook with summaries on armaments, disarmament and international security. I would leave it as it is until I flipped the page on military expenditures. In 2011 there were hot debates about the military expenditure in the US. Well, the expenditures by the Ministry of defense on national defense according to SIPRI yearbook made up 716.3 bln USD in 2012. It is a big amount, but roughly makes up about 5% of US GDP. Picture source http://www.texasgopvote.com/issues/restore-families/house-approves-national-defense-authorization-act-fiscal-year-2014-005572 For me, as for the Kyrgyz citizen, it is a big amount of dollars flowing to "fight with global terrorism activities." Just for the comparison GDP of Kyrgyzstan roughly makes up about 0.4% of US GDP. Per capita GDP of KR ($1,160) makes up around 2.3% of US per capita GDP ($49,965) in 2012. ...

The world leader in franchising is the United States of America. Franchising takes a big part of the business in the US. Among the rankings of the franchises in 2010, on the first place was Subway, the second place took McDonald's and the third place was taken by 7-Eleven. From this top list of franchise companies around the globe, we see that all of them are US franchise companies, and 2 out of 3 companies are involved in fast food industry. And this is not surprising as there are many advantages of running a fast food franchise. The most important one is that there is a same developed menu in each branch that the clients are aware about. As an example, let's say a person traveling from Seattle to Kansas city does not know good places to eat out and in order not to be disappointed she/he will choose to go to a familiar Subway or McDonald's for example. There are notable advantages as to the franchisee, so to the franchiser. Thus, a franchisee gets the rights fo...

Сегодня вечером ко мне в дверь постучал молодой парнишка. Я бы ему дала не больше 18 лет. Так как это было уже вечером, то я побоялась сразу открывать ему дверь. Спрашиваю: "Кто там?". Он мне отвечает: "Вы согласитесь, если я уберу ваш подъезд за 80 сом?" Так как моя квартира находится на последнем этаже, то у меня соответственно возник вопрос. "А остальные соседи согласны? - спрашиваю я." На что он мне отвечает, что начал с моей квартиры. Ну думаю, ладно, не буду расстраивать парнишку раз хочет подзаработать честным трудом, да и подъезд давно не убирали (не уверена, если его вообще убирают). В общем я согласилась и сказала, чтобы он у всех соседей спросил. Ну думаю будет жаль, если не все согласятся, останется наш подъезд неубранным и парнишка расстроеным. Через некоторое время выхожу значит на балкон посмотреть на парнишку, а он все не выходит и не выходит из подъезда. Ну думаю наверное упрашивает всех соседей согласится. Потом вдруг слышу шум в подъезд...

Following my previous article on the issue of a huge incarceration rates in the US. Let me clarify that I am not trying to defend or justify the imprisoned. The only thing that interests me is the economics behind the crimes/prisons. Earlier in the year, President Obama signed the amnesty for illegal aliens that would forgive undocumented people and as a result award them with legal status (Green Card). This in turn will benefit 12 to 20 million undocumented persons currently being in the US. Looks like the authorities accounted that it is more beneficial as for the state budget in terms of extra taxes to be paid by the new legal aliens (up to 20 mln!), so for the illegal immigrants as well. In 1986 through Immigration and Reform Control Act (IRCA) was the first and only amnesty for a large group of people. Back then it was 2.8 million undocumented aliens. Just imagine the benefits to the state budget from this act. First of all there is no more need to pay $160 per imprisoned ...

The United States always tends to be the first one in any sphere. It didn't stay behind in the putting people behind the bars.The US has the highest incarceration rates in the world. The second place is taken by Russia. In 2007, the US peaked in its incarceration rates and those numbers are comparable with the imprisoned people during the years from 1934 to 1953 in Soviet Union ("The Gulag Archipelago" A. Solzhenitsyn). That is 23.4% of the world's prison and jail population was in the US, and this is while there is less than 5% of the world's population living in the US. Does it mean that people in the US tend to commit more crimes or is it a matter of profits to some? Well, according to the professor in the University of Chicago, G. Becker ( the founder of the theory of economics of crime and law enforcement, a Nobel laureate in economics ): "The essence of the economic approach to crime is amazingly simple - It consists in the fact that peopl...

We want to study in good schools, get education, earn our diploma and become "smarter". But only a few people really think about education system, specifically higher education systems, their national and international standards.  Once accepted to college, a student has an important decision to make, that is, in what direction she/he should specialize on and what classes to take (unless she/he exactly knows what she/he wants to study). A certain list of required courses is provided and a student starts to studying that, often without thinking if it worth it. We obey the rules, most of us do not question already created standards. But who sets those standards? Is it a Ministry of education or a donor who makes big donations? And are the standards set in the past still relevant today? I haven't been thinking much about this issue, but got really inspired to think on this when attended the public lecture called How 'Global' is the Global Transformation of the Un...

There has been a lot of talks about China's economy, its rapid growth since 1978 (when China shifted from centrally planned to market based economy) and its recent slowdown. Most critics on China claim that its growth will gradually slow down. Transitioning from middle-income to high-income status can be more difficult than moving up from low to middle income (WB ). A comprehensive work on China called China 2030. Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative Society, was conducted by a joint research team with experts from the World Bank and China (Ministry of Finance, the Development Research Center of the State Council). A four hundred page research work covering China's path 1978 - 2030, its structural reforms, growth through technological convergence and innovation, green development, security and China's integration in Global                               ...