Trade in Pollution-intensive Products: Evidence from India

Abstract

This article explains India’s trade from an environmental perspective. Besides explaining trends and patterns of trade in pollution-intensive products, we investigate India’s comparative advantage in these products and discuss the emerging issues. The exercise based on the UN Comtrade dataset reveals that much of India’s exports happen under this category with better revealed comparative advantage (RCA) values, which do have high environmental concerns. We sum up the article by arguing that there is a need to attend to sector-specific problems encountered by these industries and have a well-knit environmental policy, so that trade and industrial expansion do not have a major environmental concern.