India’s Leaders Don’t Seem to Believe in Indians
The country’s lame attempt at a trade policy signals a lack of confidence in its ability to compete globally.
India isn’t thinking enough about exports.
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/BloombergShort of striking oil, history has presented countries with no better path to prosperity than trade. There is one very simple reason for this: scale. Countries that produce goods and services for the world not only can specialize, but also build up larger factories and sectors than they would otherwise since they are serving demand from multiple countries’ populations, not just their own.
In most nations, the need for scale is obvious. Not so in India, which remains blinded by its huge domestic market. This was underlined last week when the government released its latest trade policy — three years late. A new policy is supposed to be produced every five years, and this one was due in 2020. It was supposedly delayed so the Indian government could analyze and respond to the vast shifts in the global trading environment brought on by the pandemic.