Trade in Services and Investment Flows in South Asia

Rajesh Chadha () and Geethanjali Nataraj ()

EABER Working Papers from East Asian Bureau of Economic Research

Abstract: Despite being a group of contiguous countries South Asia is one of the least integrated regions in terms of intra-regional investment and trade relations. The share of services in GDP of South Asian countries has increased substantially with South Asia exhibiting a high revealed comparative advantage in commercial services and more particularly in other services including computer and information technology enabled services. Analysis of the FDI inflows in South Asia reveals that the number of total sale deals including Greenfield investments and Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) have increased in recent years. Though India is ranked as the second most attractive destination for FDI, South Asian countries, including India, do not rank high in terms of the FDI performance and potential indices and are also ranked low in the global competitiveness index. The study points out the investment constraints in South Asia and cites poor infrastructure and labour market inefficiencies as the bottlenecks in attracting higher FDI inflows. Emphasising the importance of Doha Development Agenda on the one hand, the paper lays out the importance of larger and broader RTAs like Pan Asia Free Trade Agreement (PAFTA) instead of narrow RTAs like SAFTA. The success of SAFTA in enabling regional integration would depend on turning its current shallow constitution in favour of a deep agreement taking into account various behind the border issues.

Keywords: trade; Services; investment; Flows; South Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F13 F15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.eaber.org/node/21796 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 301 [REDIRECT LOOP] Moved Permanently (http://www.eaber.org/node/21796 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/21796 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/21796 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/21796 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/21796 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/21796 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/21796 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/21796)

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:eab:wpaper:21796

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EABER Working Papers from East Asian Bureau of Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shiro Armstrong ().