Russia’s Medvedev calls for marking all goods in EAEU territory

PanARMENIAN.Net - Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev believes that member-states of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia) should make a gradual transition to marking of all goods, TASS reports.

"We will sign an agreement on goods marking today, which is called to improve control over the turnover of goods in the territory of the Union. Traceability will make it possible to significantly improve operations of the common market, increase the collection of taxes and bring the whole sectors of the retail trade out of the shadows," Medvedev said on Friday, February 2.

"It is important to extend marking to new groups of goods step-by-step until all commercial products are covered," he said, addressing the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council in Almaty.

"The work should be complemented with new initiatives. The need is imminent to go deeper in other topics - nuclear energy, research and technology cooperation, healthcare, environmental protection, tourism and sports."

Medvedev also spoke in favor of more active development of cooperation between the countries of the EAEU in the digital sphere, noting resolving information security issues as one of priorities.

"Undoubtedly, the digital agenda breaks the usual boundaries and creates a common digital space. The question is how quickly it will move forward, how close our interaction will be, how much we will be able to adapt to those trends that are gaining momentum on our planet," Medvedev said.

He spoke about multi-platforms Alibaba and Amazon as an example. "Indeed, they accumulate a significant amount of information about consumers, about markets, about purchases and use all this in their commercial interests, so we really need to move faster," Medvedev said.

Medvedev noted that coordination of efforts in this sphere would be discussed at the upcoming meeting of heads of government of the EAEU countries on Friday. "It is obvious that we cannot do this alone. We will need to unite our markets - commodity, human, logistics, technological and form our own infrastructure," Medvedev said.