RCEP discussion scheduled in Australia in April
In the 12th round of the Regional comprehensive economic partnership (RCEP) talk in Perth, Australia, India will focus on greater market access in the services sector stressing on relaxing the norms in the entry of professionals. It is expected that India will cover much more than just the liberalisation of the services sector. In all likelihood, matters related to goods tariffs too could be discussed. The RCEP is a wide umbrella under which deals related to goods, services, investments, economic and technical cooperation, competition and intellectual property rights would come under. The 12th round of discussion is scheduled in Perth, Australia in April while the previous round was organised in Brunei, where several members of different nations including China spoke about reducing various duties on goods. Though India expected China to scrap import duties, and also provide duty relief for its textile exports, it didn’t offer to reduce the duty on steel to three countries such as Australia, China and New Zealand in the proposed FTA. India has signed free trade agreements (FTA) with the ASEAN group of countries, South Korea and Japan. It has planned to open its market and remove the tariff on 80% of items for the 10 nation bloc of ASEAN countries. Likewise, India planned to remove the duties for Australia, New Zealand and China on only 42.5% of their products as it doesn’t have any kind of FTA with them. RCEP consists of 10 Asean members i.e. Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Laos and Vietnam and their six FTA partners India, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
March 21, 2016 | 05:50pm IST
to success.