GSTP may provide one-stop-shop for South-South trade liberalization
20 Aug '07
4 min read
As South-South trade grows gains prominence and the complementarity in the export baskets of development countries rises, India must cash in on the four-fold advantage of the Global System of Trade Preferences (GSTP), the UNCTAD-led trade liberalization initiative among developing countries, Ms. Lakshmi Puri, Director, Division of Trade in Goods, Services and Commodities, UNCTAD, Geneva.
Speaking at Workshop on 'Going Beyond Doha negotiations: Promoting South-South Trade' organized by FICCI, Ministry of Commerce and Industry and UNCTAD, Ms Puri pointed out that GSTP would provide a one-stop-shop for South-South trade liberalisation and save India the effort of negotiating and implementing a multitude of BTA and RTAS.
The successful conclusion of the GSTP negotiations, launched at the UNCTAD XI Conference in Sao Paolo in 2005, would provide the Indian business with enhanced, predictable and privileged access to developing country partners in Asia, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
For India, it would also be an ideal complement to enhanced market access, and openness and predictability of Southern markets that it can obtain through market access negotiations in the WTO without having to make concessions to developed country trading partners or facing competition from them in Southern markets.
It is also a way of countering the layers of preferentiality that Indian business face against their exports in many Southern markets due to South-South and North-South RTAs of which India is not a part.
On the occasion, Ms. Puri launched a software tool to identify products with 'inverted duty structure'. The software tool, jointly developed by FICCI and FISME under the Government of India-UNCTAD-DFID Project on Globalisation, would enable the business community to articulate their concerns on inverted duty more effectively as it would now have a quantitative back-up.
It would benefit trade negotiators too as they would be able to prepare themselves better for FTA negotiations through a quick analyses of the range of tariff rates, which may result in inverted duty structure for a particular product.
The UNCTAD official said: “India's positive agenda would be well served because Indian goods would obtain real increased market access and trade flows as the tariff reductions would be on 'applied' and not 'bound rates'."
"Thus the margin of preference over other WTO members would be significant and this would result in considerable trade creation."
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