Rules of origin in India's trade agreements: Introducing a new dataset and severity indices

This paper develops a comprehensive dataset and new severity indices to evaluate the Rules of Origin (RoO) in India's trade agreements. RoO, while essential for preventing trade deflection, can act as a non-tariff barrier if excessively stringent. The study distinguishes between product-specific rules (PSR) and regime-wide rules (RwR), further classifying the latter into compliance and facilitation provisions. Using detailed coding of 17 India-specific agreements, the paper constructs composite indices that capture the severity and heterogeneity of origin rules. RwR provisions, spread across 39 indicators, have also been taken into consideration. Results show considerable variation across agreements: the India-EFTA agreement is the most restrictive overall, while India-ASEAN emerges as the most liberal. Partial scope agreements exhibit lower severity due to limited product coverage, whereas newer comprehensive FTAs tend to adopt more stringent RoO regimes. Robustness checks, including sensitivity to weighting, normalization, and other statistical properties, confirm the indices' stability across methodological variations. The indices and dataset presented provide a replicable framework for systematically assessing RoO severity and its policy implications.