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Arvind Subramanian.
This week's StatsGuru makes use of the information in his testimony. As Table 1 shows, Indian trade has grown rapidly since 2000; and Indo-US trade only slightly less rapidly, reflecting the dynamism of China in particular. The US' overall trade has also grown, but not as fast. Indo-US trade is more dynamic than US trade and India's trade with most regions except Asia.
But rising Indo-US trade is not the result of an imbalance, such as the US has with China, as shown in Table 2. The US' trade with India has remained as balanced as it was earlier. Much of the growth in Indo-US trade has come from services, trade in which as Table 3 shows has grown even more sharply than overall trade and much more sharply than growth in the US' services trade overall. India has managed to open its goods markets to imports, including from the US, in the years since liberalisation. As Table 4 shows, Indian tariff barriers have sharply declined and are now close to the lower-middle income average.
Overall, India's openness to trade has improved notably, as Table 5 shows, with the financial crisis of 2008 not making a significant dent in the trend. Recent concern about Indian intellectual property law related to pharmaceuticals, in particular, ignores the fact that India opened up to a modern globalised patent regime at a much lower income than almost every other country did, as Table 6 shows. Finally, rather than any domestic US law changing, the best route for dispute settlement is the World Trade Organization - as Table 7 shows, India has a history of settling and complying with the WTO dispute resolution process.
