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US wants India to open its markets to American goods

United States on Friday asked New Delhi to open its markets to more goods from US as a reciprocal gesture to its decision to restore duty free access to 42 products from India.

"Given the type of trade and economic relationship it is important to do more. One way in which we expressed that was through the movement on Generalised System of Preferences," US Trade Representative Robert B Zoellick told reporters after a meeting with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi.

"But we hope that India will open its markets so that the US can export more to India. Opening up the Indian market would allow Indian consumers to pay less for some of the US products," he said winding up his three-day visit to India.

Apart from a 45-minute discussion with Vajpayee, Zoellick had an hour long meeting with principal secretary to the PM, Brajesh Mishra, earlier in the day.

Expressing optimism about closer bilateral relationship, Zoellick said, "I hope that as we work together to deal with issues of concern in international trade we will be able to deal with some of India's concern about implementation issues and other topics for the WTO".

The USTR was, however, quick to add that he hoped India would work with the US in terms of trying to launch a new trade negotiation at the WTO.

The Bush administration had earlier this week announced restoration of duty-free access to 42 Indian products in three categories namely jewellery, carpets and leather whose current trade was valued at $540 million.

Zoellick said during his interaction with Indian businessmen one of their concerns about liberalisation in India was the "high cost of their products because of barriers to imports, which prevents them from being competitive".

"One way in which India will be more competitive in terms of exports is to lower cost of inputs through imports," he said adding that in this respect trade was interconnected to India's overall reform process.

The USTR said, "US had been working with other countries on the implementation issues for a number of months now, and in the past few weeks there has been some progress made on some issues on Trade Related Investments and other topics".

"The Indian government remains concerned about this issue. We talked about some areas where we think that we can continue to work, but there are other areas where, I frankly expressed, involved a question of negotiations and the best way to address that is in the WTO context", he said.

Terming his visit as "excellent" Zoellick said the trip had been beneficial in terms of "what I spoke about when I arrived and that was to listen and to learn more about India's reform and its interest in international economics".

"I think it's been beneficial to me and I hope it has been for my Indian interlocutors," he added.

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