柬埔寨中小企业出口许可费用成改革瓶颈

[来源: CIR] [分类提示: NEWS] 标题: Opinion: The $4,000 Barrier – What Cambodia’s SME Reform Misses By Kurt Harrison Prime Minister Hun Manet’s plan to make business registration faster is good news. Soap makers can now register in six days instead of months. This is the kind of reform small businesses need. But I want to share a different problem, one this reform does not fix. For us, registering the company was never the hard part. Getting an export licence was. I run Coolaz.me, a small social enterprise in Siem Reap. We make cooling scarves. Cambodian women make them from home. We sell to hotels and shops that need a simple way to beat the heat. Our company is registered and our taxes are in order. This kind of business matters for Cambodia. Every scarf is made by a woman working from her own home. She earns money without leaving her family or village. When we export, that money comes from outside Cambodia and goes straight to her. This is not the growth you see in a big story about a new factory. It is smaller and slower, built household by household. But it is real growth, and it only works if we can sell outside Cambodia. Here is where the problem started. We had a real order from overseas. The buyer needed proper export paperwork, called a Form D, to pay a lower tariff under ASEAN trade rules. To get that, we first needed our own export licence. We asked the price and were quoted around four thousand US dollars, just for the licence. For a small home-based business, that one fee was bigger than the p