The Mystery of Reciprocal Demand for Regional Trade Partnership: Indian Experience in RCEP Regional Value Chains

Debashis Chakraborty () and Chaisse Julien ()
Additional contact information
Chaisse Julien: Department of Law, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Office P5537, New Territories, Hong Kong

The Law and Development Review, 2021, vol. 14, issue 1, 163-214

Abstract: The decision of a country to join regional trade agreements (RTAs) is guided by its expected welfare gains, though potentials of both trade creation and trade diversion cannot be ruled out through such arrangements. The slow progress of the World Trade Organization negotiations has created a demand for mega-regional trade agreements in the last decade, but the recent US and Indian pullout from Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), respectively, raised a question on their attraction. One of the major underlying objectives of RTAs is to deepen intra-bloc participation in regional value chains (RVCs) and International Production Networks (IPNs), through adoption of reformed rules of origin (ROO) provisions and mutual recognition agreements (MRA) for standard harmonization. This article, through an analysis of the RVC–IPN participation of the RCEP countries, attempts to understand to what extent the Indian pullout from RCEP can be linked to its unfulfilled expectations. The observations indicate that, relatively modest participation in the RVCs, declining domestic value added content of exports and the associated adverse trade balance scenario have critically shaped the Indian standpoint. The evolving Indian orientation towards trade remedy mechanism can be viewed in this backdrop. The analysis concludes that in the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) period, the Indian decision to consolidate domestic manufacturing sector needs to acknowledge the reality rather than being guided by the rhetoric.

Keywords: Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan; RCEP; India’s Trade Strategy; Regional Value Chains; International Production Networks; domestic value added in exports (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ldr-2020-0078 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:lawdev:v:14:y:2021:i:1:p:163-214:n:7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ldr/html

DOI: 10.1515/ldr-2020-0078

Access Statistics for this article

The Law and Development Review is currently edited by Yong-Shik Lee

More articles in The Law and Development Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().