Indian Westerlies

WTO members are actively involved in negotiating the second phase of Information Technology Agreement (ITA - 2) at WTO. The initiative is led by US, and supported by Canada, Japan, Chinese Taipei, Korea, Singapore etc. EU and China too have shown positive signs towards the agreement under consideration. The aim is to bring down the tariff of all technology related goods to zero. The agreement includes computers and peripherals, electronic hardware including semiconductors, computer software, telecommunication equipment, and hardware/Capital Goods to produce the above. You can see here , here and here to know more about this agreement under discussion (or Google!) Now, I had blogged about the issue of our infant electronics hardware/semiconductor industry here . The issue in brief with our electronics industry is: We are lagging in the race of indigenous development of electronic/semiconductor products, and do not enjoy the economies of scale. The reasons and factors wer...

I thought of summarizing the merchandise trade data collection process in India at one place, in easily  comprehensible manner (ahem! Aim for parsimony), and the effort resulted into this post. I hope it helps to give a brief overview to anyone interested, about the merchandise trade data collection and presentation process in India.  The merchandise trade data in India, related to 'physical movement' of goods, is collected and disseminated by DGCI&S . The other part, concerning 'money movement', related to merchandise trade, is handled by RBI. The two sets of data do not 'generally' match. The error varies due to various factors, which I will discuss later on.  Let's start with the DGCI&S part.  Physical movement of Goods data: The physical trade part is monitored by Customs department (except SEZs which have their own monitoring systems, assisted by Customs). Transactions are recorded when the goods are 'cleared' ...

Past four months, I came across this statement frequently being quoted by various experts/officials:  "The exports declined this month, but imports declined more, therefore trade deficit has not been adversely affected ." F or once, September data changes it. Exports contracted by 10.8% (over last year, to 23.7 USD Billion) and imports surged by 5.09%. The trade deficit for Sept 2012 is around 18.1 Billion USD, the widest in 11 months. More on September trade data here , here or here . As I write this blog, I see that the data is surprisingly not uploaded on commerce ministry or DGCI&S website. It's the news sites from where I am getting the information!  I was never comfortable with that italicized statement. Traditionally, we had imports growing at a faster rate than exports, including last year when the imports grew by around 32% compared to exports growth of around 21%. This year, the summary is:  "For the April-Sept period, export...