The article counters the argument made by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar about the impact of economic liberalisation on India’s economy.
Impact of liberalism on India
- India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar recently disapproved of free trade and globalisation.
- About FTA’s he said that “the effect of past trade agreements has been to de-industrialise some sectors.”
- These observations were made days after countries of the Asia-Pacific region signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement.
- He said that , “in the name of openness, we have allowed subsidi[s]ed products and unfair production advantages from abroad to prevail”
Flaws in the argument
- There are several flaws in Mr. Jaishankar’s arguments.
1) India cannot be the part of global value chain
- India is now truly at the margins of the regional and global economy.
- With trade multilateralism at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) remaining sluggish, FTAs are the gateways for international trade.
- By not being part of any major FTA, India cannot be part of the global value chains.
- India’s competitors such as the East Asian nations, by virtue of they being part of mega-FTAs, are in an advantageous position to be part of global value chains and attract foreign investment.
2) Indian economy has bee relatively closed economy
- India is surely a much more open economy than it was three decades ago, globally, India continues to remain relatively closed when compared to other major economies.
- According to the WTO, India’s applied most favoured nation import tariffs are 13.8%, which is the highest for any major economy.
- Likewise, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, on the import restrictiveness index, India figures in the ‘very restrictive’ category.
- From 1995-2019, India has initiated anti-dumping measures 972 times (the highest in the world) trying to protect domestic industry.
3) Economic survey accepts the benefits of FTAs
- The External Affairs Minister is contradicting government’s economic survey presented earlier this year.
- The survey concluded that India has benefitted overall from FTAs signed so far.
- Blaming FTAs for deindustrialisation means ignoring real problem of the Indian industry — which is the lack of competitiveness and absence of structural reforms.
4) India has been a major beneficiary of economic globalisation
- It cannot be ignored that India has been one of the major beneficiaries of economic globalisation — a fact attested by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
- Post-1991, the Indian economy grew at a faster pace, ushering in an era of economic prosperity.
- According to the economist Arvind Panagariya, poverty in rural and urban India, which stood at close to 40% in 2004-05, almost halved to about 20% by 2011-12.
- This was due to India clocking an average economic growth rate of almost 8%.
Conclusion
Desire to make India a global destination for foreign investment is a pipe dream because it is naive to expect foreign investors to be gung-ho about investing in India if trade protectionism is the government’s official policy.