Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit President Obama and address a joint session of Congress this week. The two leaders have developed a genuinely warm and positive relationship. While India and the United States have worked well together over the past eight years, we have achieved no landmark outcome which captures public attention and carries our two governments into a new American administration. Launching an economic partnership with India based on trade and investment could be a key element in that legacy.
The United States has a huge interest in a prosperous successful India. It will shortly be the most populous country on the planet. It is headed toward becoming the third largest economy and now enjoys the fastest growth of any major country at about 7 per cent per year. It is a good and growing destination for U.S. trade and investment. It has the only economy big enough to spur global growth as China did over the last decade. India is well positioned to help assure a balance of power in Asia which must be a key American security objective.
Prime Minister Modi took office two years ago with strong popular support and an ambitious reform agenda that sought the annual growth of 8-10 per cent needed to employ India’s rapidly expanding population, further reduce its large remaining pockets of poverty and propel it to a more prominent global role. But the country’s contentious politics have limited his achievements to date. The Prime Minister now needs to engage India much more extensively in the world economy because no country has ever achieved sustained growth at his target rates without deepening its interdependence and India’s international competitiveness has in fact been declining. In addition, external liberalization will give new life to his internal reforms as it has in China and so many other countries.
President Obama and the Prime Minister could take three steps together that would energize India’s reforms and its economy, promote U.S. political and economic interests, and create a new framework for ongoing cooperation between the two countries. One is to instruct their officials to complete a bilateral investment treaty, which has been under negotiation for several years, before the end of 2016. This would accelerate the flow of capital, technology and global supply-chain participation to India. It would also signal to the world that India was serious about engaging globally, an essential element of confidence-building since the country has for so long been a foot-dragger on international trade and investment issues.
Source : http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/07/toward-a-new-u-s-partnership-with-india/
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