Italy Asks India To Deregulate Its Customs Tariff

Mumbai, Feb 14 (UNI) Italian Prime Minister Romana Prodi today asked India to offer easier market access to Italy for its products on reciprocal basis and also reduce its peak customs tariff.

Addressing India-Italy Business Forum at a joint meeting organized by ASSOCHAM, CII and FICCI here, Mr Prodi said that Europe particularly Italy had already opened up its market to foreigners and particularly for Indian products. India, he said has yet to do it on reciprocal basis to ensure level playing field, a release issued here said.

''In the last four to five years, India and Italy have moved forward to increase their two way trade by strengthening their exports and imports but the trade has not been harnessed to the potential level and therefore lot needed to be pursued by the policy makers of the two countries,'' Mr Prodi said.

The Prime Minister asked India to further reduce its peak customs duty particularly on items such as engineering and automobiles so as to attract Italian investments in India.

Speaking on the occasion Italian Minister of international trade Emma Bonino asked India to deregulate its economic further to create space for foreign investments to accelerate its manufacturing. In her opinion India and Italy have lot of complementariness to move together to strengthen Indo-EU trade dialogues so that the trade and commerce of two nations flourish.

UNI