Trade Facilitation: Must for India's Trade Competitiveness

Trade facilitation is a broad framework of practices that simplify and harmonize international trade procedures and domestic practices to reduce trade and transaction costs and time, and ultimately impact the competitiveness of the product and the producer. India aspires to sustain high growth rates and achieve a double-digit growth rate in the medium term to realise its potential demographic dividend. In this context, trade facilitation, along with other policy measures, assumes critical importance, and even more so as India's exports have been experiencing negative growth for more than a year now. The success of the 'Make in India' to boost manufacturing sector depends on how successfully Indian firms are integrated with global value chains and on how successful they are in increasing their competitiveness by easing the measures of doing business and by attracting investment across sectors. At the core of all these is trade facilitation, along with other improvements in structural and policy measures. This article comprehensively examines India's trade facilitation measures so far and their effectiveness and future steps.