Bilateral Investment Agreement to pave way for India-Israel FTA: Chief Economist at Israel's Ministry of Finance

New Delhi [India], September 8 : India and Israel on Monday signed a Bilateral Investment Agreement (BIT) here in the national capital, aimed at enhancing reciprocal investments and strengthening economic cooperation between the countries.

Talking to ANI, Shmuel Abramzon, Chief Economist at Israel's Ministry of Finance, said this agreement will bring "clarity and stability" to investors in both countries.

"We already have investments from both sides, and we want to increase that. This is what the agreement does," Abramzon said.

He believes that this BIT will also pave the way for a free trade agreement. "I believe it will also pave the way to free trade agreements."

"And there is already some discussions, pre-negotiations, I would call it, between the two countries. And that, I believe, will come in," he added.

Israel's Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who is in India, and India's Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman signed the agreement in New Delhi on Monday.

But there's no concrete timeline as to when the FTA will fructify, Abramzon said when asked to give guidance on any expected timeframe.

"...We are currently in a situation, a global situation, where India is very much preoccupied with the United States, and with the EU, and Israel is also negotiating with the United States. So, there is a lot of things on the plate, but once things will clear out, I am sure we will find time (for discussions)," he supplemented.

Asked how much bilateral trade can one expect between the countries, he said, "We don't have an official target", but "we believe very clearly that we can easily double and triple the trade between our countries and the investments between our countries in various areas."

The Chief Economist said the India Israel bilateral trade can go beyond traditional sector, towards more into services.

"I believe there's also really a lot of potential in services as we can talk about technologies, financial services. We want to see Indian financial firms operating in Israel," he added.

Asked how Israel looks at tariffs imposed on India by the US, he said it is a temporary phase and everything will eventually be solved.

"I believe this is a temporary situation. India and the United States are longtime partners and have a very good and clear future together, and will find the agreements to lower these tariffs, I believe that will be achieved," he said.

On India's resolute position to open its agriculture to the US, he said, "I think we all understand that country needs to balance its interests and India as a country that has a very large agriculture sector. It's very understood that you want to defend many ways, your sector. By the way, the United States also from its interest wants to open markets for its farmers. So we're talking about a balance of interest, and I think it's fair to work on that."

Further, the Israel economist said he sees lots of opportunities for Indian companies in their infrastructure space.

"Haifa Port by Adanis is really the major investment in recent years. I'm very very happy about and excited about that and, we specifically the area of infrastructure has a lot of potential for Indian companies to come in in infrastructure. We're talking about rails. We're talking about the metro system, which is going to build in Tel Aviv. Huge opportunities for Indian companies. You are building many metro stations yourself; there's a lot of opportunities. We're talking about desalination plants that Indian companies we know are already interested in and so forth. So especially infrastructure is the main area," he said.

He also said Israel is one of the biggest partners under Make in India initiative.

"Us as a small country that doesn't have the manufacturing capacity and India has, (we) would love to partner and (are) already partners in the sectors that you mentioned."

When asked, between China and India, which is that country with which Israel is looking more for manufacturing.

"We're not comparing...I'll leave to others to compare. We're very much focused on India. We believe very much in India," he said.

He echoed the Israeli finance minister's intention that they in fact want to look into having a Ministry of Finance representative in India.

"We so much believe in your mark market and we're going to focus on that in the next year. So we want to look into having a presence of the Ministry of Finance of Israel in Delhi, in order to exactly work on all these issues that I've been mentioning about increasing investments, increasing cooperation in technology and so forth," he added.

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