Determinants of India's Software Exports and Goods Exports

Abstract

Recent export experience of some large, emerging economies has raised important questions about the trade determinants of the modern-services-driven sectors and the goods-production-driven sectors. In our empirical analysis of the determinants of Indian exports of software services and of the total Indian goods exports, we raise the following questions: How (dis)similar is the performance of the Indian exports of software from the determinants of India's total exports of goods? Are such differences significant? Is the pattern of the performance of the determinants stable over time? Our findings concerning the effects of size, distance, linguistic connections, and trade-facilitating networks enable us to make some important inferences of policy relevance. © 2005 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.