India UK Bilateral Trade: Trends, Patterns and Prospects.

Abstract

International trade acts as an important mean which contributes significantly to economic growth by opening domestic economy to the global level (Sun & Heshmati, 2010). Recently, the trend of South-South and North-North trade agreement has shown a changing landscape towards a North-South agreement. India has shown keen interest to have large global access by setting up its policy covering east as India- ASEAN FTA, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and India-EU FTA is under negotiation process since 2007. Now, BREXIT i.e. U.K exit from EU on 23rd of June 2016, has put before India one of the biggest opportunity to form FTA between India -U.K so as to enhance the trade and make their relation strong. The use of various indices in the study has shown that the trade competitiveness between India and U.K, supports Free Trade Agreement. As of Trade Complementarity and Trade Similarity Index has shown that both the nations have high complementarity in their trade pattern while dissimilarity in their export in the third country which will enhance the trade if FTA is signed between both the countries. For, the SMART Model analysis, it has been found that India would stand benefit when trade alone with United Kingdom than with European Union (excluding U.K) and India gains more with the United Kingdom under full liberalization than restricted trade.