Foreign trade policy should focus more on vision for trade

Dr Arpita Mukherjee, Professor at ICRIER, proposes a step-by-step framework for India’s Foreign Trade Policy, where India should look at success stories from other countries, make subsidies WTO-compliant, and focus on market development, competitiveness and efficiency, as opposed to incentives. Overall, the global trade environment has become more difficult since the previous Foreign Trade Policy. At the time of the previous Trade Policy,
WTO was fairly well performing, so you had a place to go to in case of a problem. But the WTO has been rather de-functioned now. Additionally, if you see that in spite of the US-China war, USTR has recently taken out data, which shows that India’s exports to the US between January and November 2020 declined by 13.3%; while for China, the decline was lower at 5.8%. On the other hand, exports for Vietnam grew by 19.5%.