New Delhi [India], April 13 : Senior research fellow Shruti Rajagopalan welcomed America's decision to pause the trade tariffs for a window of 90 days and expressed her views on the global trade order. She also spoke about the steps Indian policymakers can adopt to make exports more competitive. Rajagopalan made the remarks on the sidelines of the Carnegie Global Tech Summit.
Speaking toabout the pause on Trump Tariffs, Rajagopalan said, "A 90-day pause is a welcome announcement from the United States, but overall, cooler heads need to prevail. There needs to be a systemic solution. I don't think it is a good idea to walk away from the old global trade order."
She said that people are needed at the table "who will actually negotiate low certain tariff rates across most goods and services, except very few that threaten the security and sovereignty of individual nations."
Speaking about India, she said, "I think India needs to have very clear free trade agreements bilaterally with individual countries, but other than that, I think India needs to systematically reduce its tariffs and protectionism. The reason is that it directly impacts our export competitiveness."
She underscored that if 'Make in India' and 'Manufacture in India' have to be promoted, then the need of the hour is to "have very strong trading relationships".
She said, "We need to dramatically reduce tariffs from our import partners so that we avoid tariff inversion so that we can increase our export competitiveness, and actually start increasing our overall global trade, which is also in India's domestic interest, irrespective of what the other countries do."
In her concluding remarks, she said, "My advice to Indian policymakers is just to lower protectionism and have low specific certain tariffs across the long term so that all individual businesses can actually figure out their supply chains and become very competitive exports."
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