India to worry on slow pace of service talks at RCEP.

TNPSC Current Affairs - Septemer 2017 by TNPSC Guru

During the 5^th RCEP ministerial meeting to be held on September 10 in Manila on the side-lines of ASEAN Economic Ministers meeting, India is going to raise the concern regarding the slow pace of negotiations of services trade liberalisation as contrast to higher priority given to open up goods trade in the region.

India is worried that other countries of RCEP are keen on eliminating tariffs to open up goods trade instead of sticking to RCEP Principles and Objectives. Hope India will talk tough and will discuss further on opening up goods trade, only after ensuring the negotiation on services trade liberalisation catch up with talks on goods trade. (Source Hindu)

About RCEP:

• RCEP is a proposed free trade agreement being negotiated between 10 ASEAN countries and their Free Trade Agreement partners, Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.
• If the negotiation are successful, it would create the world’s largest trading bloc.
• The trade bloc represents world’s 46 % of population with combined GDP of around $17 trillion and accounts of 40% of world trade.
• It will cover of issues such as trade in goods, services, investment, competition, intellectual property rights, telecommunication and economic and technical cooperation

India’s benefit from RCEP:

• RCEP will help to achieve India’s aim and objective of look-East policy.
• RCEP is important to India because India is not a member of 2 other major regional economic group APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic cooperation) and TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership).
• RCEP will help India’s Trade volume to increase with countries, which India not signed FTA like China, New Zealand, and Australia.
• Once the RCEP get negotiated it can easily access the entire 16 member’s trade bloc and India’s Service sector like IT, telecoms, BPO, KPO, Banking services are likely to get more benefits.