World Customs Organization (WCO) has published a new newsletter announcing amazing Capacity Building progress in one of the Customs Capacity Building programmes of the WCO.
The WCO Sub-Saharan Africa Customs Modernization Programme, funded by the Government of Sweden, comprises four projects, namely WCO-EAC CREATe, WCO-SACU Connect, WCO-WACAM and WCO-INAMA Project.
In their totality, these projects support regional Customs Unions in Africa in their mission to facilitate trade without compromising the security of their country and the safety of their citizens. The results are remarkable and very promising for the future. These are benchmark projects, displaying WCO Members ability to deliver excellent capacity building and modernization results.
The newsletter appears quarterly and informs on ongoing tasks as well as gives an overview of future activities. Don’t miss it!
You can read the Newsletter here: WCO Sub-Saharan Capacity Building and Modernization Programme Newsletter
Less than two weeks after its release, Pokémon Go has become one of the most successful mobile games of all time. The Pokemon Go players are everywhere.
Also sweden is totally consumed by this virtual game. Pokemon is a different game since the idea is that players move around in the landscape to catch Pokemon, whoch are animated charachters. These Pokemon animals are situated everywhere in our outsode environment. You need to walk around to find them and catch them with a mobile application.
The Pokemon and other stiff you need to play the game are attached to the geographical map and van be found in different places called Pokemon stops, it could be a park, a building, a beach or anywhere. So people need to walk around. You also need to walk to become better in different ways in the game. This is really a smart and good feature. People sitting too much inside, not doing exercise has become a major health problem today in many countries.
Pokemon has already become a major phenomenon all around the western world.
The augmented-reality game, which requires players to walk the streets hunting down animated creatures, has been downloaded more than fifteen million times and is already on more than ten per cent of all Android phones.
Unsurprisingly, that has investors excited about the profits the game could bring in for Nintendo, which introduced the original Pokémon twenty years ago and which now owns a stake in Niantic, the game studio that built Pokémon Go. Across a few days, Nintendo’s market capitalization rose by more than twelve billion dollars.
In Sweden you see Pokemon players everywhere. Even some Minister plays and have been on media showing their involvement in the game. On the photo above Mr. Gabriel Wikström, Swedish Minister for Health Care, Public Health and Sport, is looking for Pokemon outside the Cabinet building in central Stockholm yesterday.
I am lucky to never have been interested in games like these. So I don’t play. However I do see how this trend is really everywhere in our society today. If so, I think it is better with games that make people healthy than the other way around. So why not – Go Pokemon Go!
A new WTO Report on Trade Developments urges WTO members to resist protectionism and “get trade moving again”. WTO members need to avoid putting up barriers and “get trade moving again” in order to address slow global economic growth, according to the Director-General’s mid-year report on trade-related developments issued on 25 July. The Trade Monitoring Report concludes that the “best safeguard we have against protectionism is a strong multilateral trading system”.
“The report shows a worrying rise in the rate of new trade-restrictive measures put in place each month — hitting the highest monthly average since 2011,” Director-General Roberto Azevêdo said. “We hope that this will not be an indication of things to come, and clearly action is needed. Out of the more than 2,800 trade-restrictive measures recorded by this exercise since October 2008, only 25 per cent have been removed.
“In the current environment, a rise in trade restrictions is the last thing the global economy needs. This increase could have a further chilling effect on trade flows, with knock-on effects for economic growth and job creation”.
The WTO will continue to monitor trade policy trends and developments in WTO members’ policies and provide a platform of inclusiveness and transparency for addressing challenges facing the global trading system today.
You can read the report here: WTO Report on Trade Developments
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