India offers finance services package, no word from Jakarta

India offers finance services package, no word from Jakarta

GENEVA (AFP): India has handed in an improved banking and insurance package, trade officials said, three days before the deadline for a deal to open up global financial service markets.

India, in political turmoil after the resignation of Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral last month, is considered a potentially important, although highly complicated, market.

A further signal by India that it intends to loosen restrictions on its heavily regulated insurance and banking sector was expected even though the country is in the hands of a temporary caretaker government.

Thailand and Indonesia, recipients of multibillion aid packages from the International Monetary Fund, are among the remaining key holdouts as negotiators scramble to put together an agreement before midnight on Friday.

While the pair have shown their revised proposals in informal talks, the World Trade Organization has yet to receive their schedules for market access openings although it was promised the papers on Monday.

Better competitive efforts by Southeast Asia's wounded economies are seen as critical to a WTO-sponsored agreement that if inked, would come into force in 1999.

The Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore have already freshened up their proposals since April when negotiations for an agreement at the WTO resumed.

A deal was scotched in 1995 by the United States because fast- growing Asian and Latin American countries had not offered enough.

By early on Wednesday about 61 countries, representing more than 90 percent of global financial services revenues, had put forward market access deals.

The United States, the world's biggest and most open financial services market, has been insisting that other countries agree to grant U.S. companies equal treatment in their markets.