Instability in India's Exports: A Case of Traditional and Non-Traditional Commodities

One of the major factors that have considerably undermined the attempts towards economic development of many underdeveloped countries is the instability in their export earnings resulting from price, value and volume fluctuations. Over several decades there have been debates on the export import performance and export import instability. The purpose here is to examine the export of traditional and non-traditional commodities and further indicate the directions in which the instability has moved. In the present research paper instability indices in terms of volume, value and per unit value have been computed and an attempt has been made to find out the source of instability. For the purpose of calculation, Coppock's instability index has been used to find out the instability in export earnings in India. This study has covered the time period of seventeen years in three phases i.e., from 1990-91 to 1999-00, 2000-01 to 2007-08 and the overall period of 1990-91 to 2007-08. The study concludes that non-traditional commodities have shown higher degree of instability than traditional commodities during all the three phase of time period.