Ecuador and Vietnam are to establish a working group to study the possibility of launching negotiations on an agreement on preferential tariff treatment to accelerate their trade.

The work is part of the content of a Memorandum of Understanding on economic and trade cooperation inked recently by the Vietnamese Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Trade, the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry said on March 17.

The Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry further said that the signing of the memorandum of understanding was among steps to prepare for Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa’s upcoming visit to Vietnam, which is scheduled for the second half of this year.

According to the Ecuadorian Government’s statistics, trade between the two countries averages 100 million USD annually.-VNA