Bangladesh and India on Wednesday reached consensus over signing a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in an attempt to boost bilateral trade and investment.
This comprehensive economic partnership will benefit people of both countries and the deal will be signed after taking all the issues of Bangladesh into consideration, visiting Indian commerce minister Suresh Prabhu said.
Prabhu was talking to reporters during a joint briefing after meeting his Bangladesh counterpart Tofail Ahmed.
CEPA is a bilateral comprehensive agreement on trade in goods and services and investment.
Under a standard CEPA, two countries also agree to negotiate competition, intellectual property (IP) rights and dispute settlement mechanism.
"We will sign the deal to further advance the economic and trade relations between the two countries," Tofail said during the joint briefing after the meeting.
"We've decided to address each and every issue that both the countries are facing in bilateral trade" the Indian minister said.
Terming the present Indo-Bangla ties "one of the best ever," Mr Prabhu said there is a great understanding, relationship and friendship between the prime ministers of both countries.
As commerce ministers "we are working on how to give shape to this vision," he added.
"We have talked about BSTI and we have said we will address the issue," he said.
Prabhu noted both the countries have agreed to set up more border haats and two will be opened next month.
He said that bringing dynamism through the private sector was the top priority of both the governments, and a CEO forum will be created to give the private sector cooperation an institutional shape.
Tofail Ahmed told reporters that India had agreed to back Bangladesh in the WTO forum over the TRIPs issue.
He said a business delegation led by him will have a meeting with Indian business leaders next month to discuss business and trade cooperation between the two countries.
Tofail said Bangladesh raised the issue of anti-dumping and India assured Dhaka of addressing the issue.
India has recently raised duty on the import of jute and jute goods from Bangladesh in the face of protest from the Indian textile lobby. As the two neighbouring countries move to sign the economic partnershiop deal, trade analysts remain cautious.
Professor Mustafizur Rahman, a distinguished fellow of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), said that a number of things need to be taken into consideration while negotiating and finalising the deal.
"As the two countries are in a different level of development, the differentiation needs to be kept in mind," he said while talking to FE on Wednesday. "Bangladesh is still a Least Developed Country (LDC) and so deserves some non-reciprocal provisions."
The trade expert also said that CEPA is likely to deepen the bilateral economic relations in the long-run and there is a potential to enhance export to India.
India has already signed four separate CEPAs with Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia and all these are now in force.
India and Sri Lanka also negotiated a similar deal.
India officially proposed Bangladesh to sign a CEPA early this year at the commerce-secretary level meeting and in July gave a reminder to the matter.
Bilateral trade balance, however, is heavily tilted towards India and reached around $5,500 million.
Bangladesh's merchandise export to India stood at $873.27 million in the past fiscal year.
In contrast, the net inflow of Indian foreign direct investment (FDI) in Bangladesh stood at $114.65 million in 2017.
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