Who will India trade with?

Regional consolidation of trade may leave India out in the cold

Global trade seems to be getting consolidated along regional contours. Selective and exclusionary trade policies are gaining ground, especially in major regional trade blocs such as North America and the European Union. The phenomenon that was triggered by trade tensions between the United States and China in 2018 is becoming more widespread following the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The imposition of higher tariffs on select commodity exports by the US in 2018 played out largely as a bilateral phenomenon driven mainly by trade imbalance in favour of China and the “bring jobs back home” sentiment that had