BackMake all-out efforts to increase exports to Unspecified Regions
Exports to ‘unspecified regions’ declined from `79,068 crore in 2011-12 to `31,803 crore in 2012-13—a 59.8% fall
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The chart shows India’s growth in exports in 2012-13 in crores of rupees to various regions. The data is taken from the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCI&S).
What was it that pulled down export growth last fiscal? Was it a collapse of exports to a Europe throttled by austerity? Well, exports to Europe were weak, but they were up 9.9% during the year, in rupee terms. Exports to America went up by 20%, with exports to the US growing by 18%, again in rupee terms of course. As the chart shows, Asia and Oceania account for a large chunk of India’s exports, but growth was a comparatively tepid 12.9%.
What is most interesting as well as mystifying, as Saugata Bhattacharya, chief economist at Axis Bank Ltd, pointed out, is the sudden collapse in exports to what DGCI&S calls an “unspecified region", which fell from ₹ 79,068 crore in 2011-12 to ₹ 31,803 crore in 2012-13. That’s a fall of 59.8%. This region includes a wide variety of small countries, such as Gibraltar, Puerto Rico, the Pacific islands, Greenland and so on.
What is even more surprising, though, is that within this unspecified region, there is another sub-region marked unspecified, to which in 2011-12 we exported stuff worth ₹ 76,456 crore, which fell to ₹ 30,990 crore in 2012-13. As the chart shows, it is the fall in exports to the unspecified region that is responsible for dragging down our total exports.
Clearly, something must have gone very wrong in our exports to this unspecified sub-area of the unspecified region. It’s no joking matter either—exports to the unspecified region constituted 5.4% of our total exports in 2011-12, falling to 1.9% in 2012-13.
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