India would need, not merely a good run, but something close to the near-peak performance that was once achieved by the Asian tigers in their best years. Even then, those episodes occurred when China was a minnow rather than the dominant force looming over global manufacturing and trade as it is today. If this is genuinely India’s ambition, history offers some instructive benchmarks.
Consider first, South Korea: Perhaps the only country to have lifted itself from poverty to first-world status within a single generation. Its best sustained export boom was a CAGR of around 18 per cent between 1965 and 1985. Manufacturing expanded rapidly, moving from textiles to steel, automobiles, and electronics. The state played a central role: The currency was undervalued, credit was directed, export targets were imposed, and firms were punished for missing them. South Korea was poor, wages were low, and global trade was expanding rapidly. It also benefited from unusually close trade and geopolitical ties with the US. Taiwan followed a similar trajectory. During 1965-80, its exports grew at roughly 16 per cent per year. The formula was dense clusters of small and medium-sized enterprises, deep supplier networks, aggressive technology absorption and strong access to the American market. Taiwan managed double-digit export growth for around 15 years, again from a very low base and with low wages.
More relevant for India are Thailand and Malaysia, both middle-income and democratic — or semi-democratic — countries operating under constraints closer to India’s own. Thailand’s true export boom ran roughly from 1986 to 1996, before the Asian financial crisis, when merchandise exports grew at a CAGR of about 14 per cent. This was powered by a sharp devaluation of the baht in 1984, a surge of Japanese foreign direct investment, integration into regional production networks, labour-intensive manufacturing and electronics assembly, a predictable trade regime, and a global trade boom. Thailand became a classic late-comer export platform.
Meanwhile, Malaysia’s merchandise exports grew by almost 14 per cent per year between 1987 and 2000. The strategy was aggressive export-promotion industrialisation through foreign investment in free-trade zones, mainly from Japan but also from Taiwan and South Korea, which were by then seeking lower-wage locations. By 1996, manufactured goods — especially electrical machinery and electronics — accounted for over 80 per cent of total exports. A stable currency, export-friendly policies, fast ports and customs clearance, a skilled semi-technical workforce and specialisation in electronics turned Malaysia into a key node in the global electronics supply chain.
As Thailand and Malaysia ran into limits in more recent years, owing to messy politics and a lack of policy breakthroughs, a new Asian tiger emerged. Vietnam’s exports grew at around 14 per cent per year from 2005 to 2024, as it transformed from a minor regional exporter into a global manufacturing hub. It is the only large economy today sustaining tiger-like export growth. As labour costs rose in China and geopolitical tensions intensified, Vietnam became the preferred destination for multinational firms such as Samsung, Apple’s contract manufacturers and Intel.
Vietnam is also a “super-joiner” of trade agreements, winning preferential or duty-free access to many of the world’s largest markets. In a striking case of corporate-led growth, Samsung alone accounts for nearly 13.4 per cent of Vietnam’s exports, with the country serving as the firm’s global smartphone production hub. Vietnam combines this with a young, literate, and disciplined workforce at costs significantly below those of China, and even Thailand and Malaysia. Despite global headwinds and tougher American trade policies, including a brief episode of “reciprocal tariffs” in early 2025, Vietnam recorded a $20 billion trade surplus in 2025 and achieved GDP growth of 8 per cent.
History suggests that sustaining export growth of around 13 per cent for a decade requires these conditions: Cheap currency, strong central coordination and disciplined policy execution, a large surplus of labour at low wages, assured access to large and open markets, and a willingness to tolerate overcapacity and frequent failures. India currently possesses none of these in sufficient measure. Instead, it faces headwinds from rising protectionism, aggressive dumping by China, and reforms that are often procedural rather than outcome-oriented.
What India does have in abundance is red tape such as licences, circulars, registrations, permissions, returns, displays, registers, challans, renewals, notices — all of which lead to corruption. According to a 2024 white paper by TeamLease RegTech, Indian businesses are subject to 1,536 Acts, translating into 69,233 compliances and 6,618 annual filings. Of these, 26,134 compliances prescribe imprisonment as a penalty for violations. Labour regulation alone accounts for 463 Acts (30.1 per cent), 32,542 compliances (47 per cent) and 3,048 filings (46 per cent). India’s weak manufacturing base, modest export performance, and dense regulatory thicket are not new problems. Successive governments have tried to address them through incremental tinkering. The National Manufacturing Mission is one more, which was announced a year ago. The results have been and will be predictable.
The writer is co-founder of www.moneylife.in and a trustee of the Moneylife Foundation; @Moneylifers
 "Trump Tariffs, Tariffs, Indian export, trade")