Ukraine and Israel will sign a free trade area (FTA) agreement at the end of November, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said after a meeting with new ambassador of Israel to Ukraine Joel Lion in Kyiv on Tuesday.
“The document will significantly expand our economic cooperation and will increase trade, which now amounts to $1 billion a year,” the head of government said on his Facebook page.
Groysman also said that this month in Kyiv there will be a Ukrainian-Israeli innovative summit, the participants of which will be representatives of about 50 enterprises working in the field of high technologies.
“We consider cooperation in the sphere of innovations to be one of the most promising,” the Ukrainian prime minister said.
As reported, Ukraine and Israel completed negotiations on signing a FTA agreement in April and intend to sign it by the end of 2018. Early August, the sides finished a legal reconciliation of the text of the FTA agreement. The next step in preparing the agreement for signing is the translation of the agreed text into Ukrainian and Hebrew.
From the moment the document enters into force, Israel intends to abolish 80% of duties on industrial goods, as well as a number of agricultural products – within quotas. Import duties on the agricultural products specified in the agreement will be completely canceled during the transition periods for three, five and seven years. Partial liberalization is envisaged for a separate category of goods.
Ukraine, in turn, intends to open 70% of the industrial goods market for Israeli producers, as well as abolish duties on a number of agricultural products immediately after the entry into operation of the agreement, for some of them within three or five years. In particular, Ukraine plans to reduce tariffs for certain seasonal vegetables and fruits from Israel.
Israel will be the 46th country, with which Ukraine signs the FTA agreement.
