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Abstract
Agricultural sector has played an important role in economic development of the country by earning sizable amount of foreign exchange by exporting agricultural commodities. The export of agricultural commodities can reduce the current account deficit of the country because the values of exports of agricultural commodities are more than the import value of agricultural produces. After agreement under world trade organisation, agricultural commodities are moving from one country to another country realising the benefits of comparative advantage in the international economy. The present study is an attempt to study the growth trend, variability and trade specification coefficient index for various agricultural commodities and to study the comparative advantage of spices export from India using revealed comparative advantage, trade specification coefficient, revealed symmetric comparative advantages and revealed competitive advantage indices. For the purpose secondary data was collected from various government published sources and websites. The compound growth trend, coefficient of variation, Revealed comparative advantage (RCA), Revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA), Revealed competitive advantage (RC) and trade specification coefficient (TSC) was used to achieve the objectives. Growth trend analysis for value of export and import suggests that all the agricultural commodities showed positive trend with high inter-annual variability during the study period except for import value of jute hessian and guar gum meal import. The TSC analysis suggests that value of export was more than the value of import for all the crops except pulses, vegetable oils, fresh fruits, cashew, cocoa products and raw jute during the study period. The analysis of competitiveness of spices export showed a favourable competitive scenario, whereas the export-import balance was found slight decrease from high dominance of export over import.