INDIA'S DRIVE TO ‘GO LOCAL'

Prime Minister Narendra Modi a few days back when he announced the financial package to help ease the COVID-19 crisis made a big pitch for indigenous products, saying it would be a huge contributing factor to an “Atmanirbhar Bharat” – a self-reliant India.

- SURBHI ARORA

Autarky aka Aatma nirbhar!

Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applies to political states, societies, or to their economic systems. Autarky exists whenever an entity survives or continues its activities without external assistance or international trade. A self-sufficient economy is when a country is completely independent, produces its own goods, and does not import goods or services. Early state societies that can be regarded as autarkic include nomadic pastoralism and palace economy. Over time these economies also tend towards becoming less self-sufficient and more interconnected.

Modern economies are entwined with each other. They are open economies that interact with each other through the exchange of goods and services, knowledge, technology, culture, etc. Economic interdependence is a consequence of specialization or the division of labor. The participants in any economic system must belong to a trading network to obtain the products they cannot produce efficiently for themselves. Any change in such a network affects many participants so that the demand for various products and the incomes of the participants are interdependent. Global economic interdependence has grown exponentially in the span of a generation, as a result of great technological progress and associated policies that were aimed at opening national economies internally and externally to global competition.