Impending Strategic Business Alliance of ASEAN–India: An Experiential Conjecture

Abstract

A dynamic export demand model of India–Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) competitiveness is estimated that explicates India’s strategic export behaviour to the nth country in ASEAN in relation to the import function and the unit value of exports of India implicit to the local price level of the consumer country. The research article identifies the structure within which improvement of connectivity of India’s technical expertise could be extended to ASEAN for comprehensive and wide-ranging economic cooperation. The study’s inferences contribute in entailing how the ASEAN community recognises the need to provide necessary capacity building and to initiate reforms for enhancing their business competitiveness and to upgrade their national enterprises at a more sophisticated level determining their future competitiveness. While, on one hand, it seems that economic integration will remain the key to ASEAN competitiveness in the countenance of vicious competition in the global marketplace, on the other hand, the trade and investment relations of the ASEAN with other countries, particularly with developed economies, will also foster their investment development path and prosperity. In addition to the possibilities of India–ASEAN integration, other challenging efforts for governance would narrow the development gaps among ASEAN economies. This corroborates prospects for India in a constructive manner yielding association within the ASEAN economic framework that will eventually congregate with the affiliation. The findings entail that economists pay much more attention in identifying other sources of permanent and Asian country-specific real changes to explain economic fluctuations in ASEAN economies.