Suresh Prabhu Unleashed Report Highligting Potential of Doing Business with China

Commerce & Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu highlighted potential of India’s service exports to China.

The study underlines the opportunity available for India in increasing its services exports to China, said an official release.

Indices like Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) and Trade Complementarity Index (TCI) have been used to analyse the extent of India and China’s competiveness in this arena and the potential for the future, it added.

The study report tries to analyze the magnitude, extent and plausible reasons of India’s rising trade deficit with China.

Releasing the report, the Commerce Minister said that India’s trade relationship with China is unique and no other bilateral trading relationship evokes as much interest in India as the India-China trade relationship.

From being a small trading partner of India in 2001, within a span of fifteen years, China has rapidly become India’s biggest trading partner. Trade between the two countries has been expanding but India’s trade deficit with China has been growing, he said.

While releasing the study the Minister said that most industry associations want the Government to pursue a defensive approach to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and raise tariffs on the doctrine of domestic markets for domestic producers.

Protectionist policies are on the rise globally. The global use of protectionist measures in 2018 was unprecedented with the trade wars looming between two of the largest economies of the world.

Hence, a comparative analysis of the concessions ceded by China on 200 products in its Free Trade Agreements to India’s competing countries like Peru, Pakistan, Australia, South Korea and ASEAN has been carried out by the Department of Commerce.

Also the imports of China from these countries as well as China’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) rates have been studied.

This analysis helps in studying whether an FTA or tariff concessions by China to India (like China has yielded to India’s competing countries in FTA) can be beneficial in increasing India’s exports to China.

The idea behind this exercise has been to identify whether tariff concessions by China to other countries impede raising the share of India’s exports in the Chinese market.