Assistant Professor, Business Administration, Laxman Singh Mahar Government PG College, Pithoragarh, Uttarakhand, India
The Indian government has recently been struck by bad news- the United States of America (USA) has served it a 90-days’ notice to rescind the benefits it received under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) scheme. This essentially means that the reduced import tariffs that some Indian exports to the USA used to enjoy shall not be available to them after the 90 days period. The official reasoning put forward was that India was no more just a developing country and therefore, shouldn’t be allowed to continue to benefit from the tariff concessions that GSP entailed. But the real reason seems to be the USA’s desire to extract some trade concessions with the objective to correct the significant trade deficit that it has in its bilateral trade with India. More specifically, it wants India to postpone its proposed legislations on data localisation, desist from capping the prices of US-made medical devices & to open up its markets to U.S. dairy products. However, the Indian government is unsure whether giving in to the U.S. demand on these fronts to safeguard its beneficiary status under the GSP regime would be a worthwhile bargain. The government has requested Gurukant Desai, a widely acclaimed business tycoon with more than four decades of industry experience across diverse sectors, to recommend a future course of action. Guru has been studying newspaper reports, pouring through various statistical analyses and talking to experts to firm up his mind but is yet to arrive at any conclusion.
Data localisation, Exports, GSP (Generalised System of Preferences), Imports, Price-capping, Trade
