Country-wise analysis of trade flows in the Indian context: An exploratory study

The increasing trade association of India with rest of the world has lot of implications at both academic and policy levels. One such implication is the need to understand the changes in the importance of trading partners across time, among others. In other words, direction of trade with special reference to specific countries under consideration is more important than blocs at times and the modest attempt here is to bring out the nature of changing trade flows in the Indian context with special reference to major trading partners. The period of this study is from 198990 to 2016–17 and it is further classified into three broad sub-classifications namely 1991–92 to 1999–00, 2000–01 to 2008–09 and 2009–10 to 2016–17. The analysis conducted here is based on key open economy macroeconomic variables and therefore aggregate information regarding imports and exports are analyzed. The key findings suggest that most of the developed countries have gradually lost their shares in both imports and exports after liberalization in India's global trade. Surprisingly, China and most of the developing countries including emerging markets have gained increasing share in India's global trade. It is thus important to state that North-North trade has diminished in its importance while that of South-South trade not only increased but actually multiplied.