India & South Asia: Geopolitics, regional trade and economic growth spillovers

The South Asian countries formed the regional trade bloc namely South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) with the aim to promote regional economic cooperation through multilateral engagements. India which comes to be the largest economy in the SAARC has posted impressive economic growth in the last decades. As of now India stands major contributor to the exports and imports to/from South Asia, having trade surplus with all other countries from the region. In this backdrop, this paper presents the facts on India's role in the economic development of South Asia region while testing the potential spillovers of India's trade and economic growth. We utilize Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound test procedure for short and long run causal relations during the period 1990-2016, hence raising the quality of statistical inference. The results highlight that the economic growth and regional trade of India are found significant short and long run spillovers on the economic growth of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. The results are highly insightful for policy implication which raises the attention towards the greater degree of trade openness for balanced economic development in the region. India can act as engine of growth, and thus requires to play key role in pushing forward the SAARC objectives through political and diplomatic engagements.