Off the wire
• Chinese state-owned aluminum giant returns to profit  • Premier Li stresses renovation of rundown areas in 2017  • Feature: Women from Kenya's minority communities eye seats during August polls  • Senior Chinese legislator calls for peace, security at Asia-Pacific Parliamentary Forum  • Turkish cargo airline says cause of crash not clear  • Palestinian presidency says next major political battle will be over Jerusalem  • Moscow agrees with Trump that NATO is obsolete: Kremlin  • Indian police arrest man who sexually assaulted over 500 minor girls in 10 years  • 1st Ld-Writethru: China's ODI up 44.1 pct in 2016  • Former commander gunned down in N. Afghan province  
You are here: 　 Home

Sri Lankan PM says export earnings suffer due to withdrawal of key EU trade concessions

Xinhua, January 16, 2017 Adjust font size:

Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Monday that his country had lost high export earnings due to the withdrawal of EU trade concessions during the previous regime.

Wickremesinghe said without the Generalized Scheme of Preferences (GSP) plus trade concessions, the island country only earned 2.5 billion U.S. dollars from the export of ready-made garments while countries such as Bangladesh harvested 5.2 billion U.S. dollars.

In 2015, although Sri Lanka's apparel exports pocketed 4.8 billion U.S. dollars, Bangladesh, which had obtained the GSP Plus concessions, earned over 26.6 billion U.S. dollars in the same year, the prime minister said.

"Due to losing the GSP Plus concessions, we only managed to increase our revenue from 2.5 billion U.S. dollars to 4.8 billion U.S. dollars, not even a two-fold increase," Wickremesinghe said.

The GSP plus trade concessions were withdrawn from Sri Lanka in 2010 by the EU due to violations of human-rights agreements under the Mahinda Rajapakse regime.

The suspension resulted in Sri Lankan exporters losing duty-free access to EU markets and their shipments being charged an import duty.

However after discussions between the EU and the new government of President Maithripala Sirisena, the European Commission said last week that it had proposed to remove significant duties on Sri Lankan products after restoring its GSP Plus trade access to Europe's export market.

The European Parliament and the Council have now up to four months to raise potential objections before the measures become effective. Endit