No abstract

No abstract

In recent time, India's growing trade deficits with its partner countries have been a major policy concern, making Indian policymakers cautious about signing new free trade deals. In this paper, we argue that in addition to the impact of trade agreements on India's trade balance, policy discussions on trade agreements should also take into account the impact of trade on a spectrum of other economic indicators, such as economic growth, income distribution and employment. In particular, the impact on employment is central to assess whether or not greater trade integration is helping or harming the country, since employment numbers capture both growth and distributional aspect of trade. This paper sheds light on this aspect by examining the impact of Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN)-India Free Trade Agreement (AIFTA) on industry-level employment in India during the period of 1996-97 to 2016-17. We use a dynamic econometric model in a panel framework and find that while export and import have had favorable impact on industrial sector employment prior to 2004-05, AIFTA led to decline in industrial sector employment post 2004-05.

The creation of European Union (EU) was driven by the motivation to create a European Common Market that encourages free trade. As a result of Maastricht treaty of 1993, EU saw the biggest enlargement to date, from initial six founding members to now 28‐member countries comprising the union. The lower income countries have joined the EU with the hope to bridge the income gap between them and the higher income countries of the union. It has been observed in many studies that intra‐EU income convergence has happened. This article further confirms this finding. For income convergence to be sustainable, the lower income countries must also experience convergence in economic structures. Therefore, in this paper we try to assess how intra‐EU convergence in incomes is linked to intra‐EU convergence in economic structures. We observed income convergence in the EU has been mainly due to convergence in income shares of the industrial and services sector. The main contribution of this article is to examine the role of trade in income convergence via its impact on structural transformation of the EU. Using the augmented Chenery‐Syrquin model in a panel data framework, we have found that trade openness determines the sectoral shares of industry and services in income across the countries. We have also demonstrated that both the higher and lower income countries within the EU have gained in the share of industrial sector due to trade, although the gain is lesser for the lower income countries as compared to the gain in share of industries of the high‐income countries in the EU. However, structural convergence has not been fully achieved because the lower income countries of the EU are yet to gain from trade in terms of enhancing their income shares of services.