India’s Trade with its Major Partners: A Revealed Comparative Advantage Analysis

This paper studies India’s merchandise trade with five major partners – Bangladesh, China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA) – from 2005 to 2024, using two-digit Harmonised System (HS) data from UN Comtrade (via ITC Trade Map). India’s revealed comparative advantage (RCA) against each partner is measured with the Balassa index, and the Revealed Symmetric Comparative Advantage (RSCA) index is used to group products for 2005, 2015 and 2024. India’s average RCA has risen against all five partners, but a few products hold most of the advantage. Prod-ucts with high advantage rose against China (3 to 5), the UAE (1 to 10), the UK (0 to 2) and the USA (7 to 10), but fell against Bangladesh (18 to 8). India’s strengths are food products, textiles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, leather and jewellery. Its posi-tion is weakest against China and the UK. India should widen its export base and add more value to its exports.