New measures for Chinese customs to boost efficiency

Measures used in the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone (FTZ) to speed up customs clearance will be adopted nationwide from Thursday, the General Administration of Customs has announced.

The shanghai FTZ, which was inaugurated last September, unveiled 14 new customs regulations in the first half this year to make customs procedures faster.

One of the innovations is to allow firms' headquarters to pay taxes for all its subsidiaries as a whole. This not only saves time, but also tends to reduce corporate taxes a group company has to pay, as taxable profits of one subsidiary can be offset by losses of another.

Another time-saving practice is letting imported goods enter the FTZ first before undergoing customs clearance.

Thanks to the new practices, the average time spent on customs clearance for import and export is 41.3 percent and 36.8 percent, respectively, shorter in the FTZ than outside it, according to local customs authorities.

Greater customs efficiency has also helped to boost trade volume in the FTZ, where goods trade volume amounted to 500.4 billion yuan (about 81.5 billion U.S. dollars) in the first eight months of 2014. This was up 9.2 percent year on year, according to authorities.