Book Review: Biswajit Nag and Debashis Chakraborty (Eds.), India’s Trade Analytics—Patterns and Opportunity

NTMs may be legitimate measures addressing market or coordination failures and achieving a wide range of policy objectives from consumers’ safety and health to environment purposes. However, they can hurt competitiveness and unnecessarily raise the cost of living. Restricted access to key inputs and intermediate products, and cumbersome procedures for import and export licences and permits, cause delays and extra costs to firms hurting small and medium enterprises particularly and dampening diversification efforts. NTMs can also increase the cost of important food staples and household consumer products. The challenge is to identify ways to reduce the trade-impeding effect of NTMs while ensuring that legitimate regulatory objectives are attained. The challenge for trading partners/governments is to achieve their regulatory and public policy objectives in a way that also allows them to maximize the gains from trade for all. Cooperation among governments in designing NTMs offers an efficient option to achieve regulatory objectives while reducing potentially unnecessary trade costs. This approach can lead to greater coherence and inter-operability across national regulatory regimes, thereby enabling economies to take better advantage of the welfare-enhancing benefits from trade. The volume is a valuable document and will greatly benefit policymakers and those engaged in the foreign trade activity.