Essays on Indian agricultural exports

Guide(s)

Naik, Gopal

Department

Economics

Area

Economics

University

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Place

Bangalore

Publication Date

3-31-2021

Year Awarded

March 2021

Year Completed

March 2021

Year Registered

June 2015

Abstract

Agricultural exports from India have seen a rapid increase in the last two decades, with government policies playing an important role. Promotion of agricultural exports forms an integral part of trade policy and agricultural exports are seen as an important lever for equitable development. In this thesis, we study the causal relationship of government policy related to rural infrastructure development and property rights of agricultural products with agricultural exports. In the first paper, we estimate the causal effect of rural roads on agricultural exports in India. We use a novel data set on state-level agricultural exports at a highly disaggregated product level combined with publicly available data on road construction under Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) from 2004-2016 to estimate the effect of road access on agricultural exports. While research has established a causal link between improved rural road construction and development outcomes, we have little understanding of how integrating rural population to local markets affects their access to global markets through participation in international trade. In this paper, we ask: Do rural roads increase agricultural exports? In our pursuit of answering the above question, we also propose a novel instrumental variable approach to establish causality. We create a hypothetical implementation procedure for road construction based on geographical determinants of rural road costs and strict adherence to the population-based eligibility for treatment under the program. We use the share of the population benefiting from road construction under this hypothetical implementation procedure as an instrument for the share of the population receiving rural roads under PMGSY. This rectifies the endogeneity bias due to the timing of road construction. In our second instrumental variable, we use a fuzzy RDD design suggested by Asher and Novosad (2020).

Pagination

178p.

Copyright

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Document Type

Dissertation

DAC Chairperson

Naik, Gopal

DAC Members

Bhalla, Manaswini; Anand, Abhinav

Type of Degree

Ph.D.

Relation

DIS-IIMB-FPM-P21-02

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