If suppliers in Bangladesh can grab an additional 1 per cent share of the Chinese market by 2030, the former’s exports to China can grow to US $ 25 billion maintained a recent study even as experts have underlined paying utmost importance on signing a comprehensive bilateral free trade agreement with China while also calling for taking full advantage of the duty-free quota-free (DFQF) access of Bangladeshi products to the Chinese market.
Participating in a webinar titled ‘Bangladesh-China Economic and Trade Relations in the aftermath of the Covid-19 Global Pandemic’, they came up with the observations, which was attended by Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi as the chief guest while Bangladesh Ambassador to China Mahbub Uz Zaman, Chinese Ambassador to Dhaka Li Jiming and Executive Chairman of Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) Md. Sirazul Islam joined as the special guests.
Speaking at the event, Tipu Munshi, reportedly, maintained that currently, trade balance between the two countries is in favour of China — Out of around US $ 12.09 billion bilateral trade in FY20, Bangladesh’s export to China accounted for mere US $ 0.60 billion while import from China was a US $ 11.49 billion — even as he underlined that by fully utilising the DFQF facility, the trade imbalance can be reduced significantly and added that some progress has been made for signing an FTA with China.
…but still we need to put a lot of efforts to conclude the negotiation and materialise the prospect of the FTA, stated the Commerce Minister while adding that this he believes would help Bangladesh to face the LDC graduation challenges.
It may be mentioned here that China, as part of its unilateral market access schemes for LDCs,
has allowed duty-free access to Bangladesh for 97 per cent of its tariff lines, effective 1 July 2020.
