An Analysis of India’s Trade Flow with BIMSTEC nations- A Gravity Model Approach

Abstract
At present, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) represent 22 percent of the global population and carries immense economic promise, with a combined GDP worth $ 3.5 trillion (2018). BIMSTEC have India as the largest economy of the group followed by Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar and Bhutan. The paper tries to examine the impact of determinants of trade, on trading pattern of India with the BIMSTEC nations, by employing an augmented gravity model on panel data, since its formation for the period of 22 years i.e., from 1997-2018. The paper tries to examine the India’s trade flow within BIMSTEC trading bloc by implying augmented gravity model followed by Egger (2000,2002), Baltagi et al. (2003) and Serlenga and Shin (2007). Several checks have been performed to imply the presence of serial correlation, heteroscedasticity and contemporaneous correlation in the panels. Many other preliminary tests have also been performed to know the crosssectional dependency, stationarity, panel co-integration and normality of variables. The simple panel OLS estimation technique has been used conduct Regression. The study finds out that Heckscher-Ohlin- Samuelson theorem explain the India’s pattern of trade with the bloc. The variables GDP, per capita GDP, Trade GDP ratio, common border and belonging to BIMSTEC has positive impact on the trade between the India and country j. While tax and distance are negatively correlated with total trade of the nations as per our expectations.