"A poor trade-off": Mitra article in The Indian Express

An article written by Professor Devashish Mitra about  how India may lose more than it gains by staying out of WTO talks on tariff liberalization was recently published in The Indian Express. Mitra argues that "India should keep liberalizing its trade regime through the multilateral mechanism of the WTO as well as unilaterally. When the government talks about benefits from trade protection in certain industries, it is referring to the benefits to producers of those goods, but this at the cost of producers in other industries using those products as inputs as well as consumers. Once you factor in the welfare impact on these groups, basic international trade theory shows that the arguments made about the losses from liberalization are flawed." 02/06/13