India for clearing hurdles to movement of services within G-20

NEW DELHI: Ahead of the G-20 Summit, India today pitched for removal of impediments to movement of services within the group of 20 most advanced and fast developing member nations.

Suresh Prabhu, Prime Minister's sherpa for G-20 Summit, just hours before being sworn in as a Cabinet Minister emphasised the need for increasing spending in infrastructure and expansion of services for the economies in the group to grow by an additional 2 per cent over next five years.

Speaking at India Global Forum here he said this two per cent growth cannot come from goods alone and services need to grow as well.

"Along with goods and services, agriculture should also grow...if you want 2 per cent growth rate, then all the members of the G20 must also commit to increasing the share and remove the impediments to movement of services," he said.

India has been saying that restrictions on free movement of labour can stifle a sector that can contribute to global growth in the years ahead.

The G-20 Summit is scheduled for November 15-16 in Brisbane, Australia.

The group this year has resolved to lift collective GDP by more than 2 per cent above the trajectory over the coming five years.

Stating that it would be difficult to achieve additional GDP growth, Prabhu said: "Recent survey by the IMF said that even 2 per cent will be challenging ... because some parts of the world were not seeing growth as it should have been."

He, however, added that a few countries including India will contribute to this 2 per cent target and there is also a possibility of these countries surpassing the target.

Highlighting importance of the infrastructure sector, Prabhu said "it should be a top priority for the world community to find out how we can invest more and more resources into infra."

Obviously, India will be the biggest beneficiary because India is going to be the single largest market for infrastructure over the time.

"If India grows at that rate (7 per cent)... and if you decide to put only 10 per cent of the total GDP in infrastructure, the amount of money that would be needed in India's infrastructure would be far in excess to several other countries put together," he said.

Investments in infrastructure should not only benefit deficit nations but countries that make investment should also be benefit.

The other issue, he said, which G20 should be discussing and is going to discuss is energy, another big challenge which the world is going to face.