Trade, investment and economic growth in India and China

Using time series data from 1980 to 2014, this study examines the relationship between trade, investment and economic growth in India and China. The present study attempts to assess the contributions of not only foreign direct investment and exports as done by the previous studies but also incorporates domestic direct investment and imports. The study uses more comprehensive and recent autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound testing approach to examine the existence of short-run and long-run relationships. The main advantage of this approach is that it can be used regardless of the stationarity properties of the variables in the sample. The study gives different results for both countries. In case of China, exports, FDI  and domestic investment have positive impact on economic growth whereas for India only the variable of domestic investment has been found to be significant. China is a world leader in merchandise exports and its services exports have complemented its goods exports. The main weakness of Indian economy is the poor performance of manufacturing sector as a result of which India’s merchandise exports are concentrated around a few categories. Though India is a leader in IT related services exports but these exports are unable to compensate for poor performance of merchandise exports