ISAS Briefs

International trade matters for development but the South Asian countries have done poorly. Their trade-to-GDP ratio is much lower than that of East Asia. One reason is that for more than four decades after achieving independence, South Asians continued to believe in the import-substitution strategy of growth. The East Asians, on the other hand, used the state to aggressively build their export industry. But there is one similarity between these two parts of the Asian continent: they have sought markets for their products in the world's developed economies.