UAE aims trade with India to cross $100 billion-mark over next 2-3 years

11 Oct 2022 Evaluate

With the support of comprehensive economic partnership agreement, the UAE is aiming trade with India to cross $100 billion-mark over the next 2-3 years. The Indo-UAE trade stood at $73 billion in FY22, which got a major fillip since the two nations signed the comprehensive economic partnership agreement (CEPA) on May 1, 2022. Between FY21 and FY22, the overall trade rose 68% to $73 billion, after declining for two years. But the trend has reversed since the signing of CEPA.

The bilateral trade has increased markedly with total value of non-oil trade at $29.5 billion in first six months of 2022, growing 22% over the same period in 2021. Junior foreign trade minister of the UAE, Thani Bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi said non-oil exports too rose 31% with total value reaching $2.7 billion between May and June. He said ‘Though we've set a five-year deadline to take the UAE-India bilateral trade to $100 billion from what it is now, going by the way trade has been growing since the signing of the CEPA, I am confident that we'll achieve the target much earlier, say over the next two-three years’.

He said trade is still dominated by oil, which constitutes 62% of the overall trade value and only 38% are non-oil trade now. But he expressed hope that CEPA will change this over the years. He also said while non-oil trade balance is still in favour of India by a whisker, overall India has a trade deficit of $17 billion in FY22, led vastly by large oil imports. During the first half of 2022, bilateral non-oil trade grew 22% to $29.5 billion. The UAE minister also said his country's cumulative investments in India is over $20 billion, of which $14.4 billion are FDI, making the UAE the eighth largest FDI source for India. In April-June this year, FDI flows into the country from the UAE stood at $2.14 billion.

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