The India-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AIFTA) came into effect on 1 January 2010 with regard to Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. For the remaining ASEAN members it will come into force after they have completed their internal requirements. With this background, the present study analyses the impact of this free trade agreement (FTA) on India and the ASEAN members. Using the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database, several simulations were undertaken, involving different scenarios, of India’s trade liberalization with the ASEAN region.

This paper explores the relationship between manufacturing and growth rate in recent years. We undertake a simple cross-country analysis using UN data. When controlling for variables relevant to growth, we find no significant relationship between the two variables. We argue that manufacturing protectionism cannot be rationalized by the data for this time period.

In India, the popular perception is that economic reforms have benefited the rich more than the poor, leading to unequal income distribution as in Quah’s twin peaks hypothesis. If economic reforms are pro-rich then we would see the emergence of twin peaks in the underlying income distribution function – clustering of rich people and clustering of poor people. On the other hand, a uniform growth process at a pan-India level will lead to the disappearance of any such clusters.

Thailand’s exports include agricultural and industrial goods such as rice, processed and frozen food, electronics, fashion garments and textiles, automobiles and auto parts and accessories. The export of jasmine rice, sugar, frozen shrimp, automobiles and auto parts has been a key contributor to economic growth. Thailand has negotiated free trade agreements with Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that have helped to increase the total value of its exports.

During the past two decades, public awareness and concern regarding food safety in developed countries have increased as a result of a series of highly-publicized food scares and scandals (Henson and Caswell, 1999). In response to these events, regulations governing food production in those countries have been tightened. This has been accompanied by significant institutional changes and intensified border control of food imports in the industrialized countries.

High food prices have consistently forced families to adopt a myriad of coping strategies to meet their food needs. A comprehensive understanding of the nature and diversity of such strategies, the relative effectiveness of different strategies, and the factors that determine the choice of various strategies by different vulnerable groups is of prime importance in designing and implementing appropriate policies and programs on vulnerable groups.

Rules of Origin (RoO) are essential part of trade rules that become very important in the context of increasing globalisation of production process. Most industrial goods today incorporate inputs from a wide variety of countries (e.g. automobiles, electronic goods etc) and when traded it becomes important to determine their country of origin as tariffs depend on country of origin. International production networks (IPN) promote this new pattern of trade, such that goods travel across several locations before reaching final consumers.

The outbreak of the global financial crisis, the fluctuation of commodity prices, and the economic slowdown of the major trading partners in 2008 and the early 2009 has brought about one of the most difficult challenges to lower-income economies in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS, i.e. Vietnam, Lao PDR and Cambodia) since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Foreign trade, including both export and import, severely declined, leading to serious contraction of economic growth.

Rules of origin (ROO) define a condition under which preferential access to the product of an exporting country may be granted. Under the rules, a product must satisfy the fixed originating criteria they lay out. These rules are applied to determine whether particular exported products are eligible for preferential treatment based, for example, on the generalized system of preferences (GSP) when developed countries import the products.

This paper formulated in the context of the Indian experience in regionalism. In the past decade, India’s trade policy has seen a marked shift towards regionalism with the signing of many regional trade agreements (RTAs). As of May 2011, 13 RTAs were in force, with at least eight more under negotiations. This paper explores whether these RTAs were ultimately of use to Indian traders. To assess the usefulness of an RTA to traders, percentage ratios, like utilization, product-coverage and utility ratios, are generally calculated.