Strengthening Regional Value Chain between India and South Korea : Emerging Opportunities for Trade and Investment Cooperation

The changing dynamics of supply chains and their impact on shaping international relations in East Asia have become crucial issues for scholars and policymakers. Asia’s two major economies, India and South Korea, are reas-sessing their strategy on the changing dynam-ics of the supply chain. India is to redesign its developmental strategy to establish India-centric supply chains in key industries. India has stressed its endeavour to become a self-re-liant economy by introducing a highly ambi-tious Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme to attract FDI in strengthening and es-tablishing the supply chain linkages in India, whereas South Korea has adopted a strategy to mitigate supply chain-related risk through greater emphasis on developing strong self-re-liance and promoting economic diversification by enhancing its economic ties with India. In addition, the pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions further reinforced South Korea to-ward diversification and resilience of its sup-ply chain.1 South Korea’s development expe-rience and deep investment relations with In-dia can explore the untapped potential of bilat-eral trade and investment linkages. To ensure supply chain resilience both India and South Korea focus on critical sectors such as semi-conductors, steels, secondary batteries and chemicals, along with new technology areas like AI, 6G, Digital Infrastructure and renew-able energy for cooperation.2 In this regard, the study explores the trade and investment re-lationship between India and South Korea and identifies the potential sectors to engage in the sustainable value chain between them