ISDS Case Map
India
India and Nepal will sign a revised trade treaty and an agreement to control unauthorised trade from a third country in Kathmandu next week. A Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement is expected to be signed in future.
India and the US will have more discussions in December on the investment treaty, aimed at providing a fillip to bilateral business ties, US Ambassador, Timothy J Roemer said today.
Grievances of plantation growers over India agreeing to cut duties on import of pepper, black tea, coffee and palm oil will be addressed by a Ministers’ panel next week, an official said.
This is an important week for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Over the weekend, at the Fourth East Asia Summit in Thailand, he will witness the final fruition of the second most important foreign policy initiative he took during his first term in office — the India-Asean Free Trade Agreement.
After signing India-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement as one of the 10 members of the bloc, Jakarta and New Delhi are set to launch negotiations for a similar bilateral deal to open trade in goods and services.
Two years after the European Union and India began negotiating a Free Trade Agreement that has enemies in both places, the talks are continuing with the hope of concluding by the end of the year, but not in time for the EU-India Summit in New Delhi on Nov. 6.
Many observers say such bilateral deals risk seriously weakening any Copenhagen agreement by allowing the idea of a global limit on greenhouse gas emissions to be abandoned.
Sri Lanka is very likely not pursue a comprehensive economic partnership agreement with Pakistan because a similar agreement with India was put in cold storage last year amidst mounting domestic pressure.
US Ambassador to India Timothy Roemer has said that he is hopeful that a bilateral investment treaty between US and India will be signed by end of the year.
It is normal for trade agreements to have a political overtone. The Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) initiated by the USA during the 1990s are a good
example of this. Its FTAs with Caribbean, South American, North American and African countries covered ‘substantially all the trade’ as required under the WTO norms, but in practice they were all textile-centric , providing for duty-free import of apparel products manufactured out of raw materials obtained from the USA.
