Free trade agree­ment with India: a mile­stone for Swiss for­eign trade

With the con­clu­sion of the free trade agree­ment (FTA) with India, Switzer­land and the other EFTA states (Ice­land, Liecht­en­stein and Nor­way) have achieved a re­mark­able suc­cess. Never be­fore has India – now the world's most pop­u­lous coun­try – en­tered into such an agree­ment with a Eu­ro­pean part­ner. Our analy­sis of the agree­ment shows: The ben­e­fits for the Swiss ex­port in­dus­try are man­i­fold and far-reach­ing.

Sig­nif­i­cant tar­iff re­duc­tions for Swiss ex­porters

India pre­vi­ously levied very high cus­toms du­ties on im­ported prod­ucts. The FTA will greatly im­prove mar­ket ac­cess for Swiss com­pa­nies in India. For 95.3 per cent of im­ports of Swiss in­dus­trial prod­ucts (ex­clud­ing gold), the ex­ist­ing cus­toms du­ties will be com­pletely or par­tially lifted. Nu­mer­ous Swiss com­pa­nies will ben­e­fit from this. For ex­am­ple, the Rap­per­swil-based Wei­d­mann Group, which man­u­fac­tures in­su­la­tion com­po­nents with Swiss ma­te­ri­als in India with a li­cense part­ner. Thanks to the re­duced cus­toms du­ties, Wei­d­mann will only have to pay much lower im­port du­ties or even none at all. This will make the com­pany even more com­pet­i­tive on the In­dian mar­ket com­pared to its for­eign com­peti­tors.

Pro­mot­ing di­rect in­vest­ment as an op­por­tu­nity for Swiss com­pa­nies

A spe­cial fea­ture of the FTA is the in­vest­ment pro­mo­tion chap­ter. India hopes to im­prove its own com­pet­i­tive­ness thanks to in­vest­ments by com­pa­nies from the EFTA coun­tries. This is cru­cial for the cre­ation of mil­lions of new jobs for India's young pop­u­la­tion. As one of the twelve largest di­rect in­vestors world­wide, Switzer­land can play an im­por­tant role here and con­tribute to sus­tain­abil­ity.

We ex­plain these and other ad­van­tages of the free trade agree­ment with India for the Swiss econ­omy in our dossier­poli­tik.

to the dossier­poli­tik