India, China look to make regional trade arrangement feasibile

BEIJING: Buoyed by surging bilateral trade, China and India have made progress in joint research on the feasibility of initiating a regional trade arrangement (RTA), China's Ministry of Commerce announced here on Thursday. The two sides met in Beijing for a two-day consultation, which ended yesterday, and reached a basic agreement on cargo and service trade, investment as well as trade and investment facilitating measures, ministry spokesman Wang Xinpei said.

The consultation was the fifth of its kind since March 2006, and the two countries planned to conclude the research at the sixth consultation meeting to be held in New Delhi by October, Wang said.

The two sides would then decide whether to start free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations.

The first four months had seen trade between China and India surge by 56.8 per cent year-on-year, the highest among all the major trade partners of the world's fourth largest economy, to $11.4 billion, Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese customs statistics as saying.