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This paper investigates why India actively negotiated and ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the first global health treaty to curb tobacco use worldwide. The World Health Organization's (WHO) decision to conduct FCTC negotiations aligned with India's shifting disease burden that was pivoting from infectious to non-communicable diseases, particularly cancer, which shot up due to surging tobacco use. The WHO's decision to frame the agreement around constraining global tobacco commerce, particularly the might of multinational tobacco companies, meshed with the interests of New Delhi, which was concurrently seeking to curb surging tobacco consumption. This triggered a positive approach and attitude to FCTC negotiations, leading to India's ratification. India's negotiation and ratification of the FCTC shows that the literature(s) on rising powers and international organizations must consider how factors like the WHO's institutional politics, specifically the intent to negotiate a focused global agreement to curb tobacco production and distribution worldwide, affects how countries perceive and seek to use that agreement to bolster domestic policy concerns like tobacco control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently Varghese (2018), in his report to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Commonwealth of Australia, remarked that till 2035 India will be in the list of top three economies and will be in Asia's top three trading partners for Australia. In this context, the research questions addressed in this paper are: What is the current efficiency level of India in exporting its merchandises; What constraints does India have to overcome to improve its export efficiency; and Has the governance structure of the 'majority government' played an effective role in rigorous opening up to improve its export efficiency. The empirical analysis covering the period 2001 to 2019 indicates that on average India's export efficiency with its trading partners worked out to be about 80%. The empirical analysis has identified human capital, physical capital, and 'majority government' as important factors contributing to improvement in India's export efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing availability of high-quality higher-dimension data in international trade, many new stylized facts have also emerged. One such stylized fact is that multiproduct firms play a significant role in international trade. In this paper, we investigate the effect of US antidumping duties on the exports of Indian multiproduct firms. In particular, we study whether US antidumping duties lead the Indian exporter to alter their product-scope to third country markets (aka to trade partners other than the US). Using a unique transaction-level data from India, we find that firms affected by US antidumping duties increased the number of products exported to other destinations by about 0.7 products, on average. This translates to a substantial 40% increase in the product-scope of these firms because a typical Indian exporting firm exported an average of 1.8 products to a given destination in our sample. We also find that firms whose products spanned multiple sectors drove most of this increase. However, we do not find any difference in the product-scope response of firms producing differentiated vs. those producing homogenous products. We find our results to be robust across various specification and sample size changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor cost recovery rates and large subsidization of the agriculture and households by industrial and commercial users are two of the characteristics of the power sector in India. The paper applies a variety of linear and nonlinear unit root tests and a Kalman filter approach which can host time varying elasticities, to estimate the effects of various macroeconomic factors on the price elasticity for electricity in India during 1975–2013. The estimated price elasticity is −0.21 and the income elasticity is 0.41. The study finds that the electricity demand is affected by macroeconomic parameters such as trade and foreign direct investment. The findings of the study have implications to the policy makers and private investors who wish to invest in electricity supply utilities and infrastructure. The value of the estimated elasticity in the study is relatively smaller as compared to the previous studies reflecting, among other things, the fact that electricity demand is supply driven in India. • The Kalman filter approach hosts time varying elasticities. • The estimated price elasticity is -0.21. • The estimated income elasticity is 0.41. • Electricity demand is affected by trade and foreign direct investment. • Electricity demand is supply driven in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different modes of economic coordination constitute a key aspect of the Comparative Capitalisms research framework. With regard to emerging economies, the close relationship between the state and business has been perceived negatively as an instance of corruption and patrimonialism that are considered to be economically harmful. This paper addresses the puzzle why some large emerging economies – China, India, and Brazil in particular – have seen considerable economic growth since the 2000s despite such 'failures' or 'institutional deficits'. We find strong evidence for a public–private mode of coordination based on reciprocity. This inter-personal mode of coordination helps to explain an unexpected degree of institutional coherence of capitalism, albeit to different degrees, in the large emerging economies under scrutiny. We argue that while there is evidence of economically productive public–private coordination in China and India, economic coordination in Brazil by comparison is much more contested, and thus less beneficial economically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Doha Development Agenda recognizes the central role that international trade can play in the promotion of economic development. In fact, the increase of exports from developing countries to developed nations' markets has been considered a key element for developing countries to realize the potential benefits of globalization. Over the last decades, developed countries have provided preferential access to their markets to developing countries through nonreciprocal trade agreements. Moreover, developing countries have also participated in reciprocal trade agreements. This paper re-examines comparatively the effect of both kinds of trade agreements on exports from developing countries but also from the developed world. In line with other studies, our results across specifications are unstable. However, the results of our preferred specification give additional support to the argument raised by critics of nonreciprocal preference regimes who consider that developing countries should abandon their reliance on one-way trade preferences in favor of reciprocal agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As "power" is the chief determinant of foreign policy of each state, so in the case of Sino-Indian relations, both the neighboring states seem exceedingly hectic in satisfying their strategic interests. States tend to gain more power either for survival, strategic/economic supremacy or for hegemonic purposes. China and India are neighboring states and strategic rivals as well. Both belong to ancient civilizations, breathed in an environment of peace and non-interference, before the emergence of China and India as Modern Nation States and after getting independence from imperialists. Both are big countries, having large populations and fast growing economies. The territorial disputes and later Sino-Indian border war of 1962 sowed the seeds of longstanding mistrust, mutual suspicion and strategic rivalry between these two neighboring states, which after the jumping up of their economies are now assuming the shape of geo-strategic and geo-economic competition, within the regional vis-à-vis global context. In this regard, China has shown yawning interest in developing the Gwadar Port of Pakistan, to boost up its strategic and economic benefits while India on the other hand is investing in the Chabahar Port of Iran, just to counter the China's ambitions and to quench its own strategic thirst. This counterbalancing behavior of both the major regional powers is not only raising hackles for each other but are creating mess for the neighboring states of this particular region as well, especially for Pakistan. This instant paper is focusing the Sino- Indian geo-strategic competition, in terms of the Gwadar and Chabahar Ports and its implications for Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of the recent global financial crisis and the afterwards economic slowdown of the major trading associates of India have brought about one of the most difficult challenges to the international trade of India. Export and import, severely declined, leading to serious reductions in economic growth of India. Global trade volume growth rate declined to 2.8% in 2008 which was 7.3% in 2007. India's foreign trade also dropped parallel to global trade volumes. In the year 2007-08, India's exports and imports growth rate was 28.87% and 35.38% respectively, which reduced to 12.21% and 18.85% respectively in year 2008-09. Further the exports and imports growth rate had turned negative to -2.21% and -3.50% respectively in financial year 2009-10. In this paper, an analysis of India's foreign trade has been undertaken to see the impact of global financial crisis on international trade. The paper studies India's foreign trade by analyzing imports, exports and direction in detail. The analysis has been done by comparing all variables before, during and after the global financial crisis. Data for this purpose have been taken from the handbooks of statistics compiled by the RBI and Ministry of Commerce & Industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the trade linkages and degree of export competitiveness between Singapore, China and India. Design/methodology/approach - Balassa's export performance index and the dynamic RCA index was adopted, as suggested by Kreinin and Plummer to identify the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) of the above countries in industrial products by SITC 1- and 2-digit levels. The Spearman's rank correlation coefficient is used to identify the degree of complementarity between RCA indices. Findings - Given the abundant resources, China and India have comparative advantage in a broad range of manufactured goods as compared to Singapore. From the disaggregated analysis at 2-digit level, the paper finds that the Singapore and China exports are complements, although the degree of complementarity has being declining over time. Meanwhile, Singapore and India exports are found to be stronger complements and stable over time. The results also show that China and India exports are strong substitutes. The paper also finds that the export specialization of China and India has experienced significant changes and shifting to new export products over time. Originality/value - Given the recent trade agreements between China and Singapore and India and Singapore, it is important to examine the trade linkages (complementarity/substitutability of trade) between these countries. The paper highlights the importance of China and India in complementing countries such as Singapore as it climbs the technological ladder to maintain its competitiveness in the world market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper analyzes policies affecting global groundnut-products markets. The new US groundnut policy is now a minor source of distortion in world markets where India and China stand out as the major distorters. We analyze and quantify the effects of groundnut-products trade liberalization on consumer welfare and producer income. Our analysis shows that African exporters would gain significantly from reductions in protection and subsidies in India, and to a lesser extent, China, although China’s exports of food-quality groundnuts would expand dramatically. Net-importing OECD countries would suffer from higher world prices. The paper draws direct implications for the Doha trade negotiations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

India has had an extremely adverse balance of trade in education. Though only a minor education exporter through Mode 2, India is the world's second largest student-sending country. Nevertheless, given English as the medium of instruction especially in apex institutions, low tuition and cost of living, quite a few world-class institutions, and a long tradition of hosting international students, India should have been an attractive destination. The paper, therefore, aims at investigating into the reasons for this failure by undertaking a two-phase empirical analysis. The findings of the first phase using the panel data and pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) techniques attribute this failure to India's lower per capita income, gross enrollment ratio (GER), and per-pupil expenditure, and none of its institutions being among the top 200 world university rankings. The findings of the second phase using the logit and probit models suggest that the probability of attracting international students by those institutions significantly increases which provide a hostel facility and fellowships, have a dedicated agency, and are accredited, privately-owned and unitary type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to include investigations of current status of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) implementation initiatives as well as benefits attained through synergetic TQM-TPM implementation in the manufacturing organization to assess roadmap followed by Indian manufacturing entrepreneur toward affecting manufacturing performance enhancements. Design/methodology/approach – The study has been carried out in the large scale manufacturing organization in the country that have implemented or are in the process of implementing TPM alone and TQM-TPM both. The study emphasizes upon comparing of business performance enhancements accrued through these quality improvement approaches. Findings – The study revealed that Transfusion of TQM-TPM initiatives can significantly contribute toward the better improvement of manufacturing performance in the organization, rather than TPM alone initiatives, also leading toward realization of core competencies for meeting global challenges. Research limitations/implications – The study is conducted to develop an understanding of contributions of TQM and TPM initiatives in Indian manufacturing industry. The present study endeavors to investigate the effect of an aggressive TQM-TPM implementation plan for strategically meeting global challenges and competition. Originality/value – The study highlights the contributions made by holistic TQM-TPM implementation in an Indian manufacturing enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current article assesses emerging trends in global trade in the case of Brazil-India-China (BIC) Alliance. Although the globalized world is still recovering from the global 2008 crisis, it may be perceived that Brazil, India and China showed considerable growth during the crisis, continuing with the trend even after the crisis period. So that the growth observed in these three countries could be demonstrated, current paper is divided into three sections. The first section will deal with the emerging trends in global trade. Section two will examine emerging trends in Brazil, India, and China's foreign trade. The third section will examine the characteristics of the concept of 'new regionalism' and the role of WTO in accelerating the rate of growth in world trade for the coming years. Revised bibliography and descriptive statistics will be the methodology employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mineral resource is one of the important natural resources of India which contributes to the national income through mineral export earnings and acts as an important input for the industrial sector of domestic economy. In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the dynamic relationship among mineral export, economic growth and industrial production in India over the period from 1981 to 2010. The present study is based on secondary data which is extracted from the Reserve Bank of India database on Indian economy. We have adopted a vector auto regression (VAR) model analysis based upon impulse response function (IRF) and variance decomposition (VD) to find out the relationship among variables. The result of IRF suggests that economic growth responses positively to a shock in mining export, whereas industrial production responses in a negative way. It has been found that mining export is not contributing at large towards industrial production of India in the short run, but in the long run, a significant share of industrial production is caused by mining export. It is also found that both industrial production and economic growth explain for variation in mineral export in India in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to measure and analyze industry export competitiveness of India and it tries to achieve this by presenting a multi-dimensional framework for measuring and illustrating industry export competitiveness. Design/methodology/approach – The framework considers industry specialization, industry export growth rate, and relative export market share for a dataset of 97 different Indian industries over a five year period (2001-2005). Findings – The analyses identifies four different types of industry groups, namely domestic static, domestic dynamic, global dynamic and global static. The result shows that the majority of Indian industries are dynamic and growing faster than the world export growth rate for the period of study. A total of 40 percent of India's industries are more global, in terms of industry specialization, compared to the world average, with such highly specialized industries as silk, gums, carpets and textiles, floor coverings, pearls, precious stones and metals. The authors show that industry specialization leads to dominance in worldwide export market share. India's global dynamic industries are mainly in the raw materials, commodities and skilled manual labor rather than high tech or manufacturing sectors. Research limitations/implications – The framework allows us to measure and illustrate industry export competitiveness and permits an intra-country comparison, a comparison of various industries of one country, or permits an inter-country comparison, a comparison of one industry across different countries. Practical implications – The framework should help policymakers, government officials, industry associations, and company executives to assess their export competitiveness and focus on protecting or promoting certain industries by directing scarce resources to sectors where they may count the most. The findings of the study can also be useful for international bodies such as UNCTAD and world-bank in identifying regional industry that can foster growth of trade and economies in the South-Asian region. Originality/value – The framework used is conceptually innovative and applicable to a variety of contexts for modeling industry export competitiveness. The framework also facilitates inter- and intra-country export benchmark analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Virtual water trade has been promoted as a tool to address national and regional water scarcity. In the context of international (food) trade, this concept has been applied with a view to optimize the flow of commodities considering the water endowments of nations. The concept states that water rich countries should produce and export water intensive commodities (which indirectly carry embedded water needed for producing them) to water scarce countries, thereby enabling the water scarce countries to divert their precious water resources to alternative, higher value uses. While progress has been made on quantifying virtual water flows between countries, there exists little information on virtual water trade within large countries like India. This paper presents the results of two MSc theses which quantify and critically analyze inter-state virtual water flows in India in the context of a large inter-basin transfer plan of the Government of India. Our analysis shows that the existing pattern of inter-state virtual water trade is exacerbating scarcities in already water scarce states and that rather than being dictated by water endowments, virtual water flows are influenced by other factors such as “per capita gross cropped area” and “access to secure markets”. We therefore argue that in order to have a comprehensive understanding of virtual water trade, non-water factors of production need to be taken into consideration. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Purpose The paper is a pioneering attempt to study the relative competitiveness of Association of South East Asian Nations -- ASEAN-10, 31 provinces of mainland China and 35 states of India by disaggregate approach vis-à-vis ranking and simulation studies. Design/methodology/approach -- The proposed methodology is based on the standard ranking adopted by the World Competitive Yearbook but redefines a relevant set of data matrix consisting of 101 indicators to better reflect local conditions and characteristics of local economies. Under the proposed methodological approach, the basis of ranking is the standardized value (STD), and first the 31 economics' average for each indicator were computed following which the standard deviation was calculated. STD was computed by subtracting the 31 economies' average from an economy's original value and then dividing the result by the standard deviation. Findings -- The empirical findings revealed the specific shifts in relative competitiveness between China and India over decades and over four different environments, namely economics, government-institutions, business social categories. It was found that competitive provinces for China are concentrated along the eastern coastal region, whereas more competitive states of India are well distributed across the Indian continent. This implies that the Chinese government needs to play a more pro-active role in drawing foreign direct investment to less developed western, central and north eastern China by way of infrastructure development, tax incentives and investment in education in those regions. Studies further revealed that Vietnam is a rapid rising economy drawing closer towards Thailand while Indonesia and Philippines are deteriorating within the ten Associate of Southeast Asian Nations. Based on these empirical findings, comparative strategies and cooperation for growth and development amongst China, India and ASEAN were drawn. Originality/value -- The fundamental raison d'étre of this study stems from the desire to address an area of research gap previously overlooked. Most international studies on competitiveness rankings to date either ranked economies across the globe and/or by population sizes. One of the critical issues in emerging economies of Asia is the uneven regional development, especially the urban-rural growth disparity amongst local economies of China and India. Through competitiveness ranking of vast and diverse economies such as China, India and ASEAN-10. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The growth and export trajectories of China and India are not unique. Their significance arises from their size and the distinctive nature of their economic and political actors. For this reason they are having an increasing impact on other economies including in the developing world. This paper provides a framework for assessing these impacts, distinguishing different vectors of interaction, complementary and competitive impacts and direct and indirect impacts. This sets the scene for the articles included in this Special Issue. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Export processing zones (EPZs) are like islands of globalization. Much of the literature on EPZs and export-oriented industries (EOIs) notes a preponderance of women who are constructed as “cheap,” “nimble fingered,” and “docile” labor. This literature is dominated by socialist feminist thinkers, and this paper argues that there is a need to incorporate the insights of postmodern feminist thinkers. The article focuses on the role that language, discourse, and subjectivity play in the gendering process in handmade jewelry production in the Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ) and in the ranch production units related by common ownership in Delhi, India. It thus gives “voices” to women and men, and brings out their agency in structuring the labor market. The study confirms that gender division of labor is a product of discursive and material practices that are reproduced through discourses into which different actors invest, and that feed into the gendered subjective identities of these actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper identifies and analyzes the factors that have influenced the export performance of firms in the post-liberalization era of the Indian economy. Entrepreneurial characteristics, historical data of firms, and other firm-specific factors such as the size of operation, export intensity, technological collaboration, wage rates, and profit margins, were included in the analysis. The findings of the study suggest that the performance of firms in international markets has been better for those that have adopted more advanced e-business tools. The size of operations and the skill intensity of a firm’s workforce also play an important role in its export performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]