Trade Policy and Manufacturing Performance: Exploring the Level of Trade Openness in India’s Organized Manufacturing in the Period 1990-2010

This study presents industry-level evidence regarding the connection between trade policy reforms and manufacturing performance. It contributes to the existing literature in several respects. The study documents the level of trade liberalization at the level of individual sectors of manufacturing using explicit measures of trade policy orientation. This is done via computation of nominal and effective rates of protection, frequency and import coverage ratios of non-tariff protection and finally imports penetration ratios to assess the joint lowering of both tariff and non-tariff protection.