The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has said that the recently concluded Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between New Delhi and Abu Dhabi will “boost investment, trade, and create employment opportunities across different sectors”.
“It will have a positive effect on unemployment. It will have a positive effect … a strong effect on trade … on imports and exports of different sorts of products,” UAE’s ambassador to India, Dr Ahmed AlBanna, said at a virtual event organised by Indian think-tank Ananta Aspen Centre on Thursday.
“It will affect the flow of investments positively … The effects will be immense,” he added.
A trade deal with the UAE is among three agreements that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governments wanted to unveil to the Indian public in 2022 to boost exports to a $500 billion-mark from around $300 billion at present, and create manufacturing jobs in the process for India’s bulging youth population.
India’s unemployment rate rose to 6.1 per cent in 2017-18, the highest since 1972. The joblessness worsened during the COVID-pandemic lockdown in 2020, with nearly 100 million public sector jobs lost during the phase.
India also entered its first technical recession during the same year. The economic situation only started to improve partially in January 2022.
Besides the UAE, New Delhi is also negotiating interim Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with the United Kingdom and Australia.
In the case of the UAE, the negotiations for a trade deal kicked off in September last year and the officials from both the countries chalked out the agreement by December.
“That shows the immense interest from both sides in reaching an agreement, which will benefit the economies of both India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in different sectors, including the manufacturing sector,” said the Emirati ambassador.
“We are just waiting for signals from the leaders on both sides to approve and sign the agreement,” he added.
AlBanna said that both the countries hoped to increase the bilateral trade level to the $100 billion mark once the CEPA was ratified.
The two-way trade is heavily reliant on energy, with the UAE exporting crude oil to India and New Delhi in turn exporting processed petroleum products.
While acknowledging the reliance on energy in their economic partnership, the UAE ambassador expressed confidence that the countries would be able to diversify their cooperation to sectors as diverse as defence, cybersecurity, healthcare, and blockchain technology.