Growth, Structure and Determinants of India’s Imports 1980-81 to 2000-01

The period 1980 onwards is a very crucial period for the Indian economy due to vast changes in international economic order as well as domestic policy regimes. Imports sector, along with Indian economy, has undergone significant structural changes during this period. Hence the study of India’s imports, its growth, structure and determinants during pre and post liberalization period covering 1980-81 & 2000-01 assumes importance. The present study has been organized to analyse the growth, structure and import demand functions of total imports and some of major categories of imports for the period 1980-81 to 2000-01. For this study, the secondary data have been collected from the various issues of Annual statements And Monthly Statistics of Foreign Trade, Economic Survey and Reports of Currency and Finance. For the estimation of different import demand functions, the major determinants of imports are relative prices (ratio of Unit Value Index to Whole Sale Price Index), Gross Domestic Product at factor cost as income measure, Foreign Exchange Reserves as a measure of capacity to import and dummy variable as a policy variable. In case of various categories of imports domestic production and gross domestic capital formation (in case of Machinery category) are also important determinants. A dummy variable has been included to study the impact of liberalization policy on imports. The value of dummy variable is ‘zero’ for 1980-81 to 1989-90 and it is ‘one’ for 1990-91 onwards. In case of all the variables, excluding the dummy variable are at constant (1993-94) prices.