VOLUME 3 - ISSUE 1

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A Gravity Model Analysis of India’s Bilateral Trade Flows

Manak Kataria and Shivansh Raman
Volume 3, Issue 1
30 November 2022
Page No.: 3993-4017

We aimed to study the determinants of India’s trade with important partners and the potential for expanding trade. The Gravity model, as in physics, analyses trade between countries through the geographical “distance” between the countries and their economic “size”. We apply an augmented gravity model in order to study balanced panel data consisting of bilateral trade flows with 45 countries from 1999 to 2018. Amongst panel-data models, we decided to use a Hausman-Taylor regression to incorporate time-invariant variables, given the non-viability of the assumptions of a Random Effects model. We find evidence that the partner country’s economic size as well as India’s population and GDP have a positive influence on bilateral trade; while distance has a negative effect. These results show that the gravity model can explain the pattern of India’s trade. We also studied the impact of variables like overlapping membership in a Regional Trade Agreement (RTA) along with cultural similarities, for which we use common languages as a proxy. We find that while RTA membership has no significant impact on trade, sharing a common language has a statistically insignificant positive effect on trade flows; though the magnitude is small. By comparing the average figures for a potential trade with actual values, we can predict whether India has the potential to expand its trade with that country. We supplement this analysis by applying the method of speed of convergence, which provides more accuracy than the point-estimates method

Manak Kataria
B.A. Hons. Economics, Hindu College, University of Delhi
Shivansh Raman
B.A. Hons. Economics, Hindu College, University of Delhi

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Kataria M. & Raman S. (2022). A Gravity Model Analysis of India’s Bilateral Trade Flows. International Journal of Policy Sciences and Law, 3(1), 3993-4017.

http://ijpsl.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/A-Gravity-Model-Analysis-of-Indias-Bilateral-Trade-Flows_Manak-Kataria-Shivansh-Raman.pdf

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Soft Power: The Component to Rejuvenate and Enthuse New Life to the Strenuous India-Russia Bilateral Relations

Aditya Choudhary and Akshit Dahiya
Volume 3, Issue 1
30 November 2022
Page No.: 4018-4035

The recent Ukraine crisis has brought a strategic challenge to the robustness of the India-Russia bilateral relationship of the last many decades. Though India has neither aligned its interests totally with the western bloc nor gone the Russian way. Rather, India has played its card deftly enough to secure its national interests from both the United States of America (USA) and the Russian bloc. However, in the longer run, the Ukraine crisis has positioned a challenge to the longevity of robust Indian-Russian bilateral relations. As we can see India’s growing security and economic (trade and investment) relationship with the USA is similar to Russia’s relation with an all-time close but dependent tie with China and Pakistan. This suggests that both Russia and India are also going closer to each other’s adversaries thus showing the complex interdependence-type nature of the international relations that are taking place among nations and that no bilateral relationship is exclusive. In this article, the analysis has been done on how the once exclusive and strategically dependent bilateral relationship between Russia and India is no longer there as well as the reasons behind it. Then by drawing a comparison between the kind of relationship India has with the USA, the article emphasizes how the India-Russia relationship has been exclusively dependent on the hard power component and the government-to-government (i.e., track 1 diplomacy) channel. Neither India nor Russia have significantly involved the soft power component and there isn’t much-developed track 1.5 and track 2 channels of diplomacy between India and Russia. This results in a lack of people-to-people cooperation, which on the other hand, is the bedrock of the all-season India-USA bilateral relationship. Lastly, the article explores various possibilities of how soft power tools like cuisine, language, cinema, tourism sector, etc., can be employed to build people-to-people cooperation between India and Russia. Though the deployment of soft power components requires serious efforts but is required to give a new fillip to add more colours to the current black-and-white (energy and arms trade) relationship between India and Russia.

Aditya Choudhary
M.Phil. Research Scholar, Department of African Studies, School of Social Sciences, University of Delhi
Akshit Dahiya
LLB, Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi

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Choudhary A. & Dahiya A. (2022). Soft Power: The Component to Rejuvenate and Enthuse New Life to the Strenuous India-Russia Bilateral Relations. International Journal of Policy Sciences and Law, 3(1), 4018-4035.

http://ijpsl.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Soft-Power-The-Component-to-Rejuvenate-and-Enthuse-New-Life-to-the-Strenous-India-Russia-Bilateral-Relations_Aditya-Choudhary-Akshit-Dahiya.pdf

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