Stronger economic bond must to realise full potential of India-US ties: CEA
The Hindu Business line, April 21, 2018

The India-US relationship cannot realise its full potential without stronger economic bond, Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian said.

Subramanian is currently in Washington DC to attend the annual Spring Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Subramanian said there were some aspects of the India-US relationship which were doing extremely well, especially on the strategic side and the defence side.

“But, I also do believe that in the long run, unless economic ties bind us more closely together, this will always be a kind of relationship that will have not realised its full potential,” he said.

“I was a great proponent of the US-India free trade agreement idea some time ago. Of course, we all have to recalibrate our notions and expectations and so on,” Subramanian said on the occasion of the launch of Washington-chapter Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser of CUTS International, an Indian think-tank.

“However, I still continue to think that this is a terribly important relationship, the US-India relationship for all the reasons that all of you know about shared values, democracies and of course not to mention the critical role that the Indian diaspora plays in the US,” Subramanian said.

He said the two countries should start thinking creatively about how to sustain this relationship.

Noting that India has benefited from an open global trading system in the past and its economic fortunes in the long run depend on an open trading system, Subramanian said it was “terribly important” for India and the US to work towards sustaining this open relationship.

Current problems
“I think we need to work much more closely together in all forms. I do think that, my own personal view is that, hopefully we’ll ride out the current problems of attitudes to the trading relationships. But in the medium run, it’s up to countries like India, many middle-income countries like India, mediumsized countries to sustain an open global trading environment,” he said.

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