Policy challenges and testing the scope for regional trade integration – a case of South Asia

Purpose - The paper presents the facts on the policy challenges and opportunities in the way forward of trade and economic co-operation in South Asia amid the coronavirus disease 2019, which comes to be the least economically integrated region worldwide. Due to tense geopolitics in South Asia, trade is heavily biased toward extra-regional markets despite of existing regional trade agreements (TAs) in the region. Design/methodology/approach - Having tested the stationarity of data with structural break, the paper uses intra-regional trade in addition to other domestic economic variables as exogenous regressors in autoregressive distributed lag multivariate framework, hence raising the quality of statistical inference. Findings - This paper highlights that intra-regional trade significantly affects the economic welfare as measured by Gross Domestic Product per capita of the people from the region, hence raising the need for higher regional trade openness. If trade barriers are overcome, all the South Asian countries will gain through effective implementation of regional TAs. Research limitations/implications - The study relies on the multivariate technique with regional trade share as the main exogenous variable. In addition, the regulatory and economic conditions of all countries are different which also tends to affect the mutual degree of trade relations. Practical implications - Over the economic reasons, the manmade barriers owing to political differences are the root cause for the low intra-regional trade. Amid the pandemic, South Asian courtiers have the high time to leverage the bilateral trade for mutual benefits. India being the largest economy can play a decisive role in pushing forward the regional trade bloc – South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) – for achieving its objective through multilateral engagements in a wider perspective. Originality/value - The present study makes pioneer efforts to examine the dynamic linkages between regional trade and economic growth. The results provide new insight into the dynamics of benefits driven by trade interdependency.