AN ANALYSIS ON INDIA-ASEAN TRADE: TOWARDS REGIONAL COMPREHENSIVE ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP (RCEP)

Indo- ASEAN jointly constitutes over 1.2 Billion consumers Base. ASEAN is India's 4th largest Trading Partner with total Trade reached $71.7 Billion in 2016-17. The year 2017 commemorates 25 years of India-ASEAN Strategic Dialogue Partnership and is expected to be the largest Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). This paper is an attempt to study and analyse Indo-ASEAN Trade patterns for the past half a decade (2012 to 2017) which have seen most happening period of regional economic partnership especially among Indo- ASEAN and china-ASEAN. The present study intends to analyse the tussle between India and member nations of ASEAN as despite High export potential and strong bilateral free trade agreement, India is continuously facing trade deficit with ASEAN which has reached $9.56 Billion in 2016-17 from just $0.5 Billion in 2005-06. The present paper may also put forth reasons and suggestions for Trade Deficit in order to strengthen the policy framework of Indo-ASEAN relation. Trade remains the sore point between India-ASEAN relations, as the already existing AIFTA (ASEAN INDIA Free Trade Agreements) has received serious criticism on its overall impact and Market access issue. Thus, more importantly this study is an attempt to understand the theoretical concept of RCEP and forecast possible impacts of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on IndiaASEAN Bilateral Trade. The current paper discuss RCEP as an important contributor to India's Act East Policy which needs to be studied critically. The sources of Data are the government reports from ASEAN nations, Ministry of Commerce and Industry Statistics, GOI and few tables compiled by the authors and Research Articles, reports and data from the expert groups such as policy makers. The research methodology adopted in this paper primarily a descriptive study and both empirical and qualitative analysis used.