Trade in High Technology Products Trends and Policy Imperatives for BRICS

This paper examines the emerging strength of BRICS in hightechnology trade. We reviewed trends in high-technology trade primarily in BICS (excluding Russia). Given that China and India are leading exporters of High-tech products (HTPs) among BICS, changing patterns of intra-industry trade have been analysed at the disaggregated level for these countries. Trade denomination of Information Technology Products has been analysed as a special case to understand roles played by global trade agreements in influencing production and trade of high-technology goods. BRICS has also made significant progress in technology intensive trade in agriculture which is rarely captured in the analyses based on HTPs. The paper concludes with reflection on BRICS cooperation in global technology and trade governance for long term capacity building, industrial development and competitiveness