The 26th meeting of the Executive Committee of the ECO Chamber of Commerce and Industry ends in Istanbul

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) - The 26th meeting of the Executive Committee of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and the 17th meeting of the General Assembly were held in the building of the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) in Istanbul on 27-30 July.

It was attended by representatives of chambers of commerce and industry of the Organization’s member states - Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, as well as employees of ministries and departments responsible for tourism, transport, trade, industry and investment, business.

Chambers of commerce and industry play an important role in the socio-economic development of the country and are the locomotive for the development of entrepreneurial activity, and the platform of the Chambers of Commerce and Industry of the ECO is an effective mechanism in the further development of trade and economic cooperation between the ECO countries.

During the event, which lasted three days, meetings of the Council of Women Entrepreneurs of the ECO Chamber of Commerce and Industry, its committees on tourism, transport, development of industry and investment, small and medium businesses, on trade facilitation and the arbitration committee were held. They discussed issues of developing trade and economic cooperation between member states organizations, strengthening regional cooperation in the fields of trade, industry, and entrepreneurship.

Over the years, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan chaired the organization. Today, trade between member states of the organization, with a combined population of more than 440 million people, exceeds 600 billion US dollars. As was noted by the delegation of Uzbekistan at a meeting in the framework of the implementation of the “Strategy for Action on Five Priority Directions for the Development of Uzbekistan in 2017–2021,” Uzbekistan identified the establishment and further strengthening of cooperation with neighboring countries as a priority area of its foreign policy. ECO countries are the largest and most important trading partners of Uzbekistan. So, according to the results of 2018, trade between Uzbekistan and the ECO countries amounted to 6.8 billion US dollars, which is 40 percent higher than the previous year.

The meeting summed up the activities of the branch institutions of the organization for the current year, considered proposals and initiatives to strengthen cooperation between the chambers of commerce and industry of the Member States.

The participants were acquainted with the large-scale reforms being carried out in our country on the development of business, tourism, women’s entrepreneurship, and the measures taken to protect the rights and legitimate interests of foreign investors.

An exchange of views took place on the preparation of the constituent documents of the Arbitration Center at the ECO Chamber of Commerce and Industry in order to develop alternative ways to resolve commercial disputes. The participants in the meeting were somewhat interested in the presentation on the activities of the International Commercial Arbitration Court and the arbitration courts of the CCI system of Uzbekistan, as well as on the legal work of the Tashkent International Arbitration Center.

On the last day of the meeting, on the initiative of the Cooperation Council of Turkic-speaking countries and the Union of Chambers of Commerce and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey, a training seminar on the organization and activities of chambers of commerce and industry in Turkey was held.