Beyond the Tariff Line: The India–UAE CEPA and Market Entry by Small and Medium Enterprises — A practitioner analysis of public data, 2022–2026

The India–United Arab Emirates Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) entered into force on 1 May 2022. It was India's first comprehensive agreement with a partner in the Middle East and North Africa and the UAE's first under its global economic agreements programme. This paper assesses, from a practitioner's perspective, what the agreement has meant for market entry by small and medium enterprises (SMEs), using only publicly available official data and primary documents published between 2022 and 2026. Three findings emerge. Trade grew quickly. Headline merchandise trade rose from USD 72.9 billion in FY2021–22 to USD 100.06 billion in FY2024–25. Non-oil trade, the agreement's stated priority, became the majority of bilateral trade. Use of the tariff preferences grew too, but they cover only part of the corridor. Use is measured here by preferential certificates of origin issued in India. These rose from 98,104 in FY2023–24 to 122,036 in FY2024–25. The roughly 240,000 certificates issued up to February 2025 covered USD 19.87 billion of exports. The CEPA is one layer of a stack. It sits alongside a bilateral investment treaty, a central-bank framework for rupee–dirham settlement, linked national payment systems, and a large and growing population of Indian-owned businesses licensed in the UAE. For SMEs, these non-tariff layers, together with rules-of-origin compliance, distribution, pricing and payments, are likely to matter more than the tariff cut itself. The paper proposes a simple "entry stack" framework for SME decision-makers. It closes with implications for firms, intermediaries and policymakers. It also sets out the limits of an analysis built on aggregate public statistics.