Former Trade Negotiators Predict Some Progress Toward India Trade Deal by Year's End
There will be some rapprochement on trade between India and the U.S. by the end of the year, but nothing substantive, former U.S. trade negotiators predicted during an Oct. 3 webinar.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
At an event hosted by the Washington International Trade Association, Dawn Shackleford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former assistant U.S. trade representative for South and Central Asia, said that she predicts there will be "some type of an announcement" by the end of the year saying that there has been "some kind of progress" on trade negotiations, but cautioned that "there won't be a lot of details associated" with it.
Shackleford said the announcement likely will be "just a joint statement or something like that, something to kind of tide us over." Having spent years watching "the various free trade agreement negotiations that India has done over the years," she warned that "nothing ends quickly, and I just can't see this one ending quickly, either."
Mark Linscott, a senior adviser with The Asia Group and former assistant U.S. trade representative for South and Central Asia, said that, in his view, there won't "be an announcement unless the 50% [tariff rate on India] goes down." He said that he is "pretty confident" that that will happen before the end of the year and that there is a "decent chance" that the reciprocal tariff rate, "goes down a bit." He said that it will likely not drop as low as 15% from its current 25% rate but "maybe to 20%."
Linscott said that "we might actually see more in substance" by the end of the year in the form of a trade agreement, but that "one of the wild cards" is that President Donald Trump likes to announce deals "prematurely," before the negotiating is complete. He said that the USTR is "negotiating hard on specific issues" and that they are making "some progress" but that there is "more work to do." Trump "doesn't want to give them more time for that. He wants an announcement sooner than that," he said.
Linscott said that Trump was "predicting confidently" that there would be a trade agreement "even as early as mid-July," but that he "got that really wrong." He said that a "series of intervening events that weren't trade-related" set back negotiations, and that the conflict between India and Pakistan had contributed. Trump "wanting credit for a ceasefire there" and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi "not offering that credit," derailed negotiations, he said. "But hopefully things are back on track," and while the U.S.-India relationship is "always going to be a bit of a rocky road," he said, "the trajectory again looks up." He is "no longer making predictions, but I think that there's a real prospect again, for a significant agreement."