Special Economic Zone in Gujarat: An Analysis of Exports Growth

Abstract

Many developing countries of the world specially China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore etc. achieved unprecedented growth in its GDP by changing their foreign trade policy with the help of Export Processing Zones (EPZs), Free Trade Zones (FTZs), Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and many more similar zones with different connotation in their respective countries. Though India was the first in Asia to introduce FTZ in Kandla Gujarat in 1965, it could not achieve a desirable outcome from the objectives set by the government of India. In April 2000, India came up with modification in its earlier EPZ policy to new SEZ policy and later passed an Act called Special Economic Zone Act 2005. This policy paper was adopted and implemented with objective of development of sufficient and high- quality infrastructure by private sector, able to attract considerable amount of foreign investment with advance technology, single window clearance, liberal labour laws, lead to increase not only number of SEZs and its units but also value and volume of export and employment in the country. In this perspective, researchers tried to analyze the trend and composition of SEZ exports from Gujarat state with the help of secondary data from 2010-11 to 2019-20. Despite various efforts by the state government, the share of SEZ exports from Gujarat is relatively decreasing compared to all India SEZ exports as well as overall export from the country. SEZ export from Gujarat is volatile because a huge share of export and import of petroleum products comes from Reliance SEZ Jamnagar alone. Export growth performance of private SEZs compared to government SEZ is also found poor in the last 10 years from 2010-11 to 2019-20.