India–China: Changing Bilateral Trade And Its Effect On Economic Growth

This paper highlights the policy aspects of India and China, in the context of consensus building on bilateral trade, which is the cornerstone of diplomatic and political ties between the two countries. India and China have witnessed uninterrupted economic development with a significant rise in bilateral trade because of protrade policies in the last few decades. In this backdrop, this paper examines the dynamic spillovers of India–China’s bilateral trade on the economic growth of the two countries. For the purpose, Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model in multivariate framework is utilized with gross capital formation (GCF) and foreign direct investment (FDI) as two additional explanatory variables. The results highlight that the India–China bilateral trade share has significant long-run impact on the growth of GDP per capita (GDPP) of the two countries, while the impact is more pronounced for China. The growth rates of the two countries are found significantly cointegrated with the variables in question. The results provide important insights in foreign trade patterns, with policy implication for trade and economic co-operations between the two countries.