Rashmi Rastogi

One of the core development objectives of the liberalization regime in India was to enhance FDI in the high-technology industries. Although FDI inflows have increased substantively, it seems that the development goal of technology transfer has not been realized. Moreover, weak enforcement and compliance of environmental norms has put the country at risk of a pollution-haven effect. We examine the pattern of FDI in manufacturing industries, differentiated by technology-intensity and pollution-intensity, to discern the nature of industries that have attracted foreign investment. We build a comprehensive dataset using three databases (on external merchandise trade, foreign investment and domestic production), and find that FDI inflows increased substantially in capital-intensive industries, but not in skill-intensive manufacturing. High-tech export-oriented polluting industries gained significantly, suggesting possibility of a pollution-haven effect through export-platform FDI in pollu...

type="main" xml:id="twec12164-abs-0001"> Recently, the apex environmental agency of India observed that domestic industrial pollution has been increasing at an alarming rate over the last two decades, and the need to rein in traditional polluting industries. This raises the pertinent question of whether the poor domestic pollution regime has affected the pattern of India's trade in dirty manufactured products in the post-liberalisation era since 1991. We find that on the whole, India has remained a net importer of pollution-intensive manufactured goods; however, there is a distinct trend of increasing specialisation in specific dirty industries especially in the bilateral trade with high-income countries, and to a lesser degree with low-income countries. The USA being India's single largest country trading partner in the post-liberalisation era, we test for pollution offshoring at the finer industry level in US-India bilateral trade. While we find that the pollution haven effect is not significant, India's specialisation in certain dirty manufacturing industries through the last decade remains a disturbing trend. India needs to integrate environmental sustainability within industrial growth urgently, and it is pertinent to implement policies which would reflect the true pollution costs in an industry that is increasingly competing in the international market.

In this paper we examine the pattern of inward FDI at the disaggregated industry level (NIC 3- digit), and test for the industry-specific characteristics that have been significant in attracting foreign investment in India during 2000-10. Since highly polluting industries (based on Central Pollution Control Board classification) have accounted for a substantive share of the FDI inflows, we control for these industries to discern the differential impact of industry characteristics in the dirty manufacturing sector. Our analysis of the FDI inflows focuses on a panel of top ten investing countries, as well as individual countries with relatively stringent environmental norms. Our results indicate that aggregate FDI in India was most significant in capital-intensive industries and those with large market size. Similarly, investment from Japan and UK was most significant in capital-intensive industries. However FDI from the US was significant in less-energy intensive industries, while wi...