Onion exports markets and their stability for increasing India's exports Markov chain approach

Onion is one of the important vegetables exported from India and it is necessary to identify the countries on which India could rely upon for future exports. In this article an attempt is made to measure the dynamics of changes in the exports of onion from India to different countries with the help of a Markov chain model. From one step transitional probabilities the model is extended to n-step for future forecasting. The results have shown that Malaysia, UAE and Singapore were having high probability of retention and will continue to be the major importers in future also. As revealed in the low values of probability of retention, Saudi Arabia and ‘others’ were unstable importers of Indian onion. In the next decade, Srilanka and Bangladesh are likely to increase their imports from India though it may come at the cost of UAE. The exports of onion from India could increase to 5.06 lakh tons by 2004–2005 AD.