Indo-Asean Trade: A Study with reference to Agriculture Sector

The change in the international trade picture and analogous changes in India's foreign trade policies have illustrated far reaching implications for India's agricultural sector in general and agricultural exports in particular with ASEAN economies. The present paper has ascertained the changes in comparative advantage status of India's agricultural exports with other ASEAN economies during 2000–12. The main focus which has been looked into deals with the trade potential of Indo-ASEAN trade and assess the impacts of their trade on each other.

By depicting an overview of the prototype and masterpiece of India's world trade as well as its trade with the main ASEAN countries, this paper remarks that the fresh trends in India's export and import structures point to its increasing participation centered on ASEAN economies. It is recognized that ASEAN countries have gain significant market admittance in India in several agricultural products. The important observation that follows from the results is that there are some commodities in which India has a wide comparative advantage but along with that some commodities are imported from the ASEAN economies and then re-exported in other processed form. This is the main reason that there is a twinning mode nature of the commodities. Results contend that increasing demand for exports has played a significant role in India's outstanding export performance. Apart from expanding world demand, India's export performance primarily has been attributed to competitiveness of exports and market distribution of exports. The performance of majority of agricultural commodities has been subject to their competitiveness in world export market. Further competitiveness of exports in majority of markets helped in the improvement in market share of India in respective markets and in world export market as a whole.