Entry, Competitiveness and Exports: Evidence from Firm Level Data of Indian Manufacturing

The industry and trade policy regimes in India have witnessed drastic changes since 1991. The dismantling of the industrial licensing system and thereby allowing free entry to and exit from the industry of firms in 1991 followed by the WTO induced trade liberalization leading to substantial reduction in tariffs and gradual softening of foreign investment regulations, particularly in the context of foreign direct investment since 1995, may have had significant impact on the state of competitiveness in India industries. In this paper an attempt has been made to evaluate the effects of trade and industrial policy changes on domestic competitiveness for select Indian industries during post-liberalization period. Though there exists a pool of empirical literature focusing on the state of competitiveness in India, the link between theoretical models underlying the empirical analysis is not often strong. Moreover, a section of the literature focuses on a combination of firm and industry data for drawing conclusions on firm behavior, which may not reflect the actual scenario. Given this background, the present paper attempts to provide a unified approach to examine the inter-relationships between entry and competitiveness within a consistent oligopolistic market framework. The empirical analysis of the present study, carried out on the basis of firm data for 14 sectors over 1990-2008, indicates that Indian industry have shown considerable changes over the last decade in terms of entry and competitiveness. An overall decline in concentration is witnessed between the two end points, which signify the importance of newer entry in the markets. The Price-Cost Margin however behaves differently for different sectors, which could be explained by the differing level of spillover of technical changes as a result of increased pressure of competition due to liberalization. Demand curve is generally found to be inelastic and declines over the period. The relationship between the size of the firms and their export volume turns out to be significantly positive.Competitiveness; entry; industrial liberalization; trade liberalization

Entry, Competitiveness and Exports: Evidence from Firm Level Data of Indian Manufacturing

The industry and trade policy regimes in India have witnessed drastic changes since 1991. The dismantling of the industrial licensing system and thereby allowing free entry to and exit from the industry of firms in 1991 followed by the WTO induced trade liberalization leading to substantial reduction in tariffs and gradual softening of foreign investment regulations, particularly in the context of foreign direct investment since 1995, may have had significant impact on the state of competitiveness in India industries. In this paper an attempt has been made to evaluate the effects of trade and industrial policy changes on domestic competitiveness for select Indian industries during post-liberalization period. Though there exists a pool of empirical literature focusing on the state of competitiveness in India, the link between theoretical models underlying the empirical analysis is not often strong. Moreover, a section of the literature focuses on a combination of firm and industry data for drawing conclusions on firm behavior, which may not reflect the actual scenario. Given this background, the present paper attempts to provide a unified approach to examine the inter-relationships between entry and competitiveness within a consistent oligopolistic market framework. The empirical analysis of the present study, carried out on the basis of firm data for 14 sectors over 1990-2008, indicates that Indian industry have shown considerable changes over the last decade in terms of entry and competitiveness. An overall decline in concentration is witnessed between the two end points, which signify the importance of newer entry in the markets. The Price-Cost Margin however behaves differently for different sectors, which could be explained by the differing level of spillover of technical changes as a result of increased pressure of competition due to liberalization. Demand curve is generally found to be inelastic and declines over the period. The relationship between the size of the firms and their export volume turns out to be significantly positive

Does Openness Affect Regional Inequality? A Case Study for India

This paper examines the impact of economic liberalization on interregional inequality in India. It has been observed in many studies that interregional inequality in India has been steadily increasing over time. This paper is a further confirmation of this result. We have tried to locate the cause of rising interregional inequality within the production structure of the economy and observed that it is positively and systematically related to the cross-regional inequalities in agriculture and manufacturing. This systematic relationship has further been examined from a structuralist viewpoint to unravel the factors determining manufacturing production across regions where we have found that trade openness is the key factor determining the manufacturing share in income across the regions. Our further enquiry into manufacturing and trade patterns has shown that the Herfindahl index of concentration has been increasing over time on both counts. This result, along with the findings of the structuralist model about disproportionate growth of manufacturing across regions, provides an explanation of the cause of rising interregional inequality in India. Copyright (C) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Entry liberalization and export performance: a theoretical analysis in a multi-market oligopoly model

This paper is an attempt to demonstrate how the entry (costless) of firms in an industry may have a dramatic effect on exports from an industry in a country. The results have tremendous implications for LDCs suffering from resource and BOP constraints but having reservoirs of cheap labor. The welfare effects of such entry liberalization policy (or subsidy) can be stated from the Bhagwati theorem that a reduction in an only (single) distortion is necessarily welfare improving by reducing monopoly or oligopoly distortions. However, we have shown that the entry liberalization policy is welfare superior to an equivalent subsidy policy where equivalent is defined in terms of the impact on exports. As a by product, we have also shown how one can integrate the oligopoly models of trade with the general oligopoly literature. The results on the limiting behaviour of an open economy oligopoly model extend the standard results in the oligopoly theory in a closed economy.Entry liberalization and export performance, entry, trade and the limiting behaviour,