Quantifying Trade Barriers: Has Protection Declined Substantially In Indian Manufacturing?

This paper makes an attempt to quantify the trade barriers operating in Indian industry in order to understand whether protection levels actually decrease following trade liberalization. In particular, we compute several measures of trade liberalization covering both tariff and non-tariff barriers- effective rate of protection, import coverage ratios and import penetration rates under different phases of trade reforms. An overview of studies covering different aspects of protection in Indian manufacturing sector The various measures of trade barriers, particularly the tariff and non- tariff based measures of protection, are outlined in this paper