Chennai: Despite the increasing number of trade agreements around the world, including gender-related provisions, neither India’s FTA nor PTA has a provision. India should consider negotiating the FTA to reduce tariffs on women-intensive sectors and help women-led businesses take advantage of government procurement opportunities, and see it as Exim Bank.
In recent decades, gender issues have been increasingly integrated into regional trade agreements (RTAs). Of the 353 regional trade agreements around the world, 101 RTAs include at least one clear provision to address gender issues.
In addition, in its RTA, 153 counties have at least one targeted rule. However, India is not one of these countries. According to the WTO database, neither the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) nor the Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) have a gender-specific provision or gender chapter.
India needs to consider renegotiating existing FTAs to include gender regulations or gender chapters in its FTAs. Women-intensive industries such as food and beverages, textiles and clothing, on average, face higher tariffs when investing. In India, women also face an average price of products in India 6 percentage points higher than those produced by men.
Policymakers need to negotiate tariffs that are relatively important for women’s employment in these sectors. Analysis by EXIM Bank shows that exports from these sectors are lowered by 1% for the relatively important tariffs for female labor, which could lead to a 0.363% increase in India’s labor supply and a 0.136% increase in India’s GDP. The overall welfare benefits from tariff reductions are estimated to be nearly 3.6%.
The India-UK FTA wrote chapters on government procurement. “India can take targeted measures against women-led businesses to take advantage of procurement opportunities arising from such Free Trade Commissions and remain competitive after rising international competition in international and domestic procurement,” Exim Bank said.
