ABSTRACT
Probably the best thing that can be said about economic relations between India and the three countries of North America since the Second World War is that they represent a vast unfulfilled potential. The major reason for this under performance in trade and commercial relations has been the inward focus of India’s economic development strategy. Three fundamental principles of India’s development strategy set the tone for the country’s external commercial relations. The first is that India’s industrialisation strategy was based on the import substitution paradigm which had widespread popularity in the 1950s and 60s. Given India’s very large domestic market, acceptance of the import substitution paradigm persisted in India much longer than in many other developing countries, primarily because economic growth was never seriously constrained by saturation of the domestic market.
