"The US continues to be concerned about the insufficient transparency in many aspects of India's trade policy, inch Michael Punke, US Ambassador to World Trade Organization (WTO) said in the WTO Trade Policy Review (TPR) of India in Geneva upon Wednesday, according to transcripts available here.
This contributes greatly towards the difficulties of firms, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, trying to purchase and trade with India, and helps explain India's ranking of 165 out of 183 countries on the planet Bank's 2011 "Doing Business" report, he said.
"In addition to India's failure to submit required notifications towards the WTO, particularly in the areas of agriculture, subsidies, SPS as well as TBT, India does not regularly issue draft regulations or participate in the timely public consultations that would ensure the improvement of sound policies in matters affecting trade and expense, " he said.
Traders often face difficulties in places like customs valuation, tariffs and other charges, internal taxation, transfer licensing, and trade remedies, because of opaque or inconsistently-applied methods, Punke said, adding that a uniform, all-of government approach to the development of regulations would go quite a distance to addressing these concerns.
Noting that the lack of transparency in India's trade policy regime led the united states to ask India so many written questions for this particular TPR, Punke said "the US became increasingly amazed at the number of matters it found to be important and for which it had been unable to obtain answers independently. ".