A quantitative assessment of the trade openness – economic growth nexus in India

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is motivated by research-based assertions that: the causes of economic growth in countries like India are not well understood; they are not elucidated by using simple bivariate relationships between economic growth and other variables, taken one at a time; and dynamic linkages between growth, trade openness and financial sector depth are required for any comprehensive treatment of this inquiry. Design/methodology/approach – This paper investigates the pivotal role of financial depth (defined as the relative importance in the economy of the banking sector or the stock market) and whether it bears any evidential relationship to trade openness and economic growth during the era of Indian post-globalization since 1990. Two key objectives are to uncover whether there is a long-run relationship between the variables and whether they can be said to cause one another. Autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedures and vector autoregressive error correction mod...