Title: India and Bangladesh: an analysis of bilateral trade between two emerging economies of SAFTA

Authors: Hafiz Wasim Akram; Shouvik Sanyal; Habib Sano Aliy

Addresses: Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship, Dhofar University, Salalah 211, Oman ' Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship, College of Commerce and Business Administration, Dhofar University, Salalah, Oman ' Department of LSCM, Sawla Campus, Arba Minch University, P.O. Box 13, Gofa Zone, SNNPR, Ethiopia

Abstract: The paper analyses India-Bangladesh bilateral trade with reference to South Asian Free Trade Area. For the purpose of analysis, the data period ranges from 1995 to 2019. The primary analysis reveals that bilateral trade has been weak, lackadaisical and the SAFTA agreement has not brought about any perceptible change in bilateral trade performance of these two countries. The causes of poor trade performance have been checked by applying revealed comparative advantage (RCA) as suggested by Balassa (1965) and trade complementarity index (TCI) as suggested by the International Trade Department of World Bank (ITD-World Bank, 2010). The prospect of intra-industry increment was also examined by using Grubel-Lloyd index introduced by Grubel and Lloyd (1971). The analysis reveals that India and Bangladesh suffer from lack of export specialisation in a majority of product groups and weak trade complementarities exist between them.

Keywords: India-Bangladesh trade; revealed comparative advantage; RCA; trade complementarity; Grubel-Lloyd index; SAARC; SAFTA; India; Bangladesh.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBG.2024.142249

International Journal of Business and Globalisation, 2024 Vol.38 No.3, pp.425 - 440

Received: 28 Jan 2021
Accepted: 09 Apr 2021
Published online: 16 Oct 2024 *

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