Investigating India’s pollution-intensive ‘dirty’ trade specialisation: analysis with ‘revealed symmetric comparative advantage’ index

This study intends to explore India’s comparative advantage in the pollution-intensive product export with temporal and spatial analysis by applying an alternative measure of revealed comparative advantage index. The emission-intensive manufacturing commodities are mainly chosen as per the list published by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) of India to draw some inferences on India’s pollution haven characteristics. For the spatial analysis, the ‘dirty’ comparative advantage is calculated for all the BRICS countries for the year 2017, and for the temporal analysis, the index value is calculated for 42 product groups at 3 digit SITC level from 2009 to 2017 to examine the structure of ‘dirty’ specialisation in India and its change over time. India is found at the top among the BRICS members for a maximum of 16 in 25 products. Among these 25 sectors, Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa are found having a comparative advantage in 4, 12, 11 and 10 products, respectively. In these comparatively advantageous products, Brazil ranked one in 75% and three in 25% of products. Russia ranked one in 33% and two in 67% of products. India among the BRICS members stood 1st at 62.5, 2nd and 3rd both at 18.75% cases, respectively. Findings reveal that pollution-intensive trade-exposed sectors successfully absorbed the stringent environmental regulation-shocks which brought in an additional burden of compliance cost upon trade competitiveness. The results of this study are more insightful for evaluating India’s recent initiatives for stricter environmental regulations.