1/ One argument advanced against freely tradable import credits whose total quantity is tied to total exports is that it takes us back to License Quota Raj or that it is "socialist".
In fact, its purpose is to mimic the gold standard so that our foreign debt is kept in check. 2/ The gold standard is useful precisely because gold is scarce. Scarcity is the essence of being money. Bitcoin limits the total quantity of Bitcoin that will ever be mined.
The essence of the market mechanism is to allocate scarce resources.
Import credits work the same way. 3/ The only restriction on import credits is that their total quantity is tied to exports. Subject to this scarcity constraint, they trade freely and the market determines the price.
Government does not set the price not does it determine who gets to buy the credits. 4/ All that an importer has to do is to pay the current market price for a given amount of import credits they need. It is like purchasing any other financial instrument like stocks or bonds and those are also scarce in the sense their total quantities are limited too. 5/ The essence of License Quota Raj is that the government made case by case decisions about every investment or import decision. That led to massive delays, inefficiency, partiality & corruption.
Freely traded import credits involve none of that and are in no sense socialist.🙏 