Topic Free Trade Agreement

India has spent decades building an economy in which its people can sell software, consulting, engineering, education, healthcare and other specialised skills to the world. Yet there is a peculiar constraint on that advantage. A software engineer may be employable…

A free trade agreement can remove a tariff overnight. It cannot make a factory produce faster. It cannot make a foreign regulator recognise an Indian certificate. It cannot make a small exporter understand rules of origin. It cannot reduce the…

An exporter can win something that looks like a major commercial advantage and still struggle to use it. A government negotiates an FTA. A tariff falls from 10% to zero. The headline says market access has been opened. But the…

A free trade agreement is supposed to make trade easier for both sides. But easier trade does not necessarily produce balanced gains. This creates a peculiar problem for countries like India. A government can negotiate lower tariffs and secure preferential…

A free trade agreement is usually presented as a bargain between countries. Tariffs fall, markets open, exports rise, and both sides are expected to gain. But an economy is not a single actor. The same tariff cut that makes an…

A free trade agreement can reduce a tariff on a car and give consumers more choice. Try doing the same thing with milk. The economics changes immediately. For an automobile manufacturer, greater foreign competition may force investment, efficiency and product…

India is signing free trade agreements at a pace that would have seemed difficult to imagine a decade ago. Yet, at the same time, it continues to draw remarkably firm lines around some parts of its economy. Dairy remains protected.…

For years, Europe was important to India without necessarily being central to India’s strategic imagination. It was a major market, a source of investment, technology and high-value imports, and a collection of countries with which India maintained strong bilateral relationships.…

For decades, a free trade agreement was largely understood as a bargain over tariffs. One country opened its market. The other did the same. Exporters gained cheaper access, consumers gained more choices, and governments measured success in tariff lines. India’s…

A free-trade agreement is supposed to make borders matter less. But what if the world is moving in the opposite direction? India is signing more trade agreements at precisely the moment when trade itself is becoming more political. The logic…