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Expected gains guide the decision to join trade agreements (TAs). While it is difficult to predict whether the ongoing trade war will result in a significant shift in the global trade paradigm, India's renewed interest in TAs with numerous developed economies, as well as worsening trade balances with existing TA partners, necessitates a review of India's current TAs before negotiating new ones. Using a stochastic frontier gravity model, the study evaluates the impact of RTAs (free and preferential; deep and shallow) on India's export efficiency from 2002 to 2020. The paper also investigates how TA affected Indian exports during the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020. The findings demonstrate that India's preferential and shallow TAs had a maximum export efficiency of 55 % between 2002 and 2020. Moreover, shallow TAs demonstrated their resilience in encouraging Indian exports in 2020. Findings reveal that India has failed to fully leverage its deep TAs, which are critical for stimulating commerce, investment, and economic growth. As a result, India must safeguard its interests during the ongoing deep trade talks by focusing on non-tariff barriers and rules of origin to promote exports and harmonize regulatory standards to facilitate FDI-led integration into global GVCs to boost export potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The study examines the role of trade agreements (TA) in determining merchandise export efficiency in India using the stochastic frontier gravity model. We estimate the impact of select trade agreements (bilateral, SAFTA, APTA, ASEAN, and MERCOSUR), regulatory quality, and FDI inflow on India's export efficiency in the period 2002 - 2018. Results suggest that TAs have enhanced India's merchandise export efficiency to its trading partners except for the MERCOSUR bloc. However, substantial potential is still untapped. The study finds that the regulatory quality (RQ) of importing nations does not enhance India's export efficiency. Moreover, the RQ of India is promising but not significantly promoting exports. The study suggests that India should further liberalize its existing trade agreements, harmonize and improve regulatory standards facilitating cross-border trade and export-oriented FDI, and undertake trade access to top-consuming markets to achieve its full export potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries South Asian intellectuals began to develop a specifically Indian political economy - ostensibly grounded in Indigenous interests, values, norms, knowledge systems, and practices - as a response to the failure of the British colonial government to bring 'moral and material improvement' to the subcontinent. The article examines the relationship between colonial knowledge / power and the anti-hegemonic project of an Indian political economy, which claims to assert 'Indigenous' knowledge as counter-knowledge, but continues to share the same discursive space as orthodox political economy. The contribution explores how the alterity and indigeneity of Indian political economy was justfied and discusses the power relations in which the legitimacy of this alterity was enmeshed. Finally, the article analyses the limits set to the emancipatory impetus of such an 'indigenous, postcolonial critique'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]