The India - Korea Cepa ― An Analysis of Industrial Competitiveness and Environmental and Resource Implications

This book assesses the changes that the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) could produce by boosting the competitiveness of firms in India and Korea. It evaluates the CEPA in terms of its effects on the environment and natural resources of the importing and exporting countries alike. Further, it employs the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and relative trade advantage (RTA) methods of analysis to gauge the influence of the CEPA on industrial competitiveness in both host and receiving countries. While the CEPA would increase trade between India and Korea in their respective strong domains, the book argues that, given the nature of the exported and imported goods and products, India would be more susceptible to serious environmental impacts than would Korea. The book subsequently presents these impacts in a qualitative framework and stresses the need for a comprehensive valuation of not only environmental impacts, but also the losses due to tariff cuts and the gains due to increased trade between the two countries.

Prof. Sudhakar Yedla is a Professor of Environmental Policy at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) and has been associated with the institutions since 1999. He graduated with a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. He was a Post Doc at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand and received a diploma in International Environmental Law from the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), Switzerland. He has also completed a course in Environmental Economics and Development Policy at the World Bank Institute, Washington, D.C. USA. He has held visiting fellow positions in international institutions such as New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA), Korean Institute for International Economic Policy (Seoul, South Korea), AIT (Thailand), and National Institute for Environmental Studies (Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan) to name some. He has more than 6 books to his credit including two published by Springer “Urban Transportation and the Environment: Issues, Alternatives and Policy Analysis” (authored) and “Cities and Sustainability – Issues and Strategic Pathways” (co-edited); about 40 papers in international journals, and many more in national journals and conference proceedings. He has worked with many international development organizations such as UNDP, UN-FAO, UNEP, ADB, and World Bank.

Dr. Choongjae Cho is Senior Director General of Research Planning & Coordination Department at Korea Institute for International Economic Policy(KIEP), Seoul, Korea. Before this he was Head of the South Asian Team at the same institution. He is also an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies(HUFS), Seoul, South Korea. He is a member of the board in the Korean Association of Indian Social Science Research and the Institute of Indian Studies Korea. He is an expert on Indian economy and the economic cooperation between Korea and India. He graduated from Pusan National University (Busan, South Korea) in Economics and obtained his Ph.D. from HUFS. He was a visiting scholar of Claremont Graduate University in USA.