The Trade of India

THE volume of the internal trade of a subcontinent like India must be several times its external or foreign trade, and its relative importance must have grown with the shrinkage of the latter during the Great Depression, which intensified the general trend to economic nationalism and self-sufficiency. No reliable estimate of the quantum of inland trade is, however, available, and the very concept of such trade lacks definiteness. The monthly statistics of the inland (rail and riverborne) trade of India published by Government relate to interprovincial or interblock trade, India having been split up for the purpose into 22 principal blocks of which 12 represent the British provinces (including Delhi province), 5 represent the principal port towns, and 5 represent major Indian states or groups of them. These statistics take no account of intrablock trade, of which there may be several gradations, such as interdivisional, interdistrict, intertaluka, and intervillage trade. It is clear that no estimate of internal trade as thus comprehensively understood is possible, and, short of that, its amount or volume will depend upon the number of units into which the country is divided for the purpose of recording the movement of goods. A study of the internal trade of the country must, indeed, be coextensive with a study of its production, economic activity, and transport. Here we shall briefly consider the trends of, and the policy underlying, India's foreign trade of which regular and up-to-date accounts are available. International trade has a peculiar significance also in that the differences in the relative advantages of production of different countries which give rise to it are wider, the costs of transport ordinarily greater, and the mobility of factors of production much lower than in respect of internal trade; so that, theor tically, the utility of a given volume of international trade is larger than that of an equal volume of internal trade. A study of international trade is, besides, more important for an appraisal of the position of a country's economy vis-a-vis the international economy, and vice versa, while the internal specialization of economic activities among the different regions of a country has fewer international implications. The significance of our study of Indian trade, based as it is on published foreign trade returns, is, however, reduced by the noninclusion of the large and growing volume of trade on government account

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