Annual supplement to Foreign Trade Policy - Blogger's review

The supplement to FTP was a mixed bag. The highlights of the supplement to the FTP can be accessed here. 

The blogger shall concentrate on few areas that appear novel. The usual 'percentage point increase in this incentive and widening of that scheme' will be left out, as any such review will just be a repeat of last year's post on annual supplement. Cutting the clutter out, the supplement has the following points:

• Some tweaking of land requirements and related criteria for SEZs
• Rationalization of Export Promotion Capital Goods Scheme
• Incentive scrips from exports can also be used to pay service tax on procurement of services
• Incentives for High tech products exports to be notified soon
• Incentives on incremental exports performance improvement
• Improvement in quality and timeliness in Foreign Trade Data
• Second task force on transaction cost in International Trade constituted
• EDI initiatives and procedural simplification efforts to continue

The review:

The blogger had posted about one of the loopholes in FTP where people were importing luxury cars in the guise of capital goods without paying the duty, here. That has now been plugged. EPCG scheme rationalization takes care of that. 

The SEZs land requirements has been eased, helping smaller SEZ developers. The moot point is, is this the main bottleneck in SEZ development? I believe that unless there is major change in tax policy, SEZ scheme had its day. SEZ scheme is a classic example of inconsistent tax policy. The assurance of a tax free exporting zone was killed the day minimum alternate tax was imposed on the developers and unit holders of SEZs. When the act was made, and people entered into the scheme, the expectation was that it would be tax free for at-least a decade or more if not for ever. The MAT was imposed in 2011, barely 5 years into the scheme. Many of those who put in their money felt cheated.  Predictability of taxation regime is important for long term business decisions. Ad-hoc changes, such as this, is not good. Now there is an exit option that has been given in this year's supplement to such units/developers in SEZs. That helps. 

The blogger is a big supporter of Hi-tech exports from India. Given the talent and availability of cheap labour, we should look into the area of hi-tech manufacturing and exports. The earlier post on M-SIPS in this blog pointed towards it. This incentive would help in that direction. 

Incentives on incremental exports performance is something that always intrigues me due to the ex-post nature of scheme. If a firm does well, it gets incentives whereas a struggling firm (which actually needs a helping hand) is left behind. During economic slowdowns, such scheme would help firms with relatively inelastic demand of its products (such as Reliance petroleum) against firms that have an elastic demand for its products, and who actually get affected during recessions. 

Foreign trade data reporting is something that has been a pain for long. I have blogged about it mainly here, and also here and here. Some promise of improvement in quality and timeliness is made in this supplement, but there is no talk of making it available for free, or to present it in an usable format to scholars/researchers. If one doesn't want to spend hard, the only recourse is to refer World bank/UN Comtrade data, which of course, has a big lag. 

The supplement also talks about e-brc initiative and EDI/EFT, which is a laudable effort of 'last year'. I wonder why it occupies so much space in this supplement. E-everything is the way to go. 

A point is to be noted about the new task force on reduction in transaction costs incurred for international business from India. The first task force report can be accessed here. The second task force is now open for suggestions, which can be mailed by next month to transactioncost@nic.in. The blogger is planning to send some points. I hope the second task force does not lean so heavily on World Bank's doing business report to come up with its own report. There is still a lot of documentation pain in the system that need smart solutions.

So that sums up the review. There are limits to what an incentive doling ministry can do within budget constraints. The supplement is a praiseworthy effort. However, there is a serious lack of research on the actual impact of these incentives. I hope some budget is made for sponsoring such studies in future. 

PS:

Meanwhile, one line in the FTP supplement (point 17.5) caught my attention. It reads "In order to facilitate IT exports, we have extended the facility of work-from-home to STPI/EOUs/BTPs/EHTPs." 

Really? Was the Govt. keeping a watch on the IT companies, for all these years, if all employees worked from office premises only, and not remotely login from home? What an idea Sir ji. You are just 15 years behind the times.