Doha impasse paves way for EU-India FTA

India’s interest in bringing the services center-stage in the Doha round stems “not only from the fact that it will generate employment, but, also because it will enable us to capture the demographic dividend” in the long run, he said at a FICCI-World Bank session on the launch of the World Handbook of International Trade in Services.

Pushing strongly to bring down barriers to trade in services, Khullar argued that it is increasingly getting difficult to foresee the future structure of trade in services. On the one hand there are services in which “technology is embedded as in software” and on the other hand there are services like communications which “ride on technology”.

Khullar also lamented the fact that areas like agriculture in which “there was not much to be gained”, were holding up progress in talks at the WTO. “In the Doha round, services negotiations have not really taken off due to the stalemate on agriculture and industrial goods. Until you end the deadlock on agriculture and non-agricultural market access, nobody will talk on other things,” he said.

World Bank lead economist Aaditya Mattoo, the co-editor for the hand-book, which showcased the importance of services to India: In the past 15 years, the country’s services exports have increased 15-fold, to $74 billion in 2006; Over the past decade, India’s exports of business services have grown at 25 per cent per annum, which is the highest the world over except for Ireland.