8 Trade and Industrial Performance Since the WTO Reforms: What Indian Evidences Suggest? Alokesh Barua, Debashis Chakraborty and Pavel Chakraborty INTRODUCTION Te Uruguay Round (UR) of multilateral trade negotiations had led to a substantial improvement in market access for manufacturing in global trade mainly due to the reductions in tarifs barriers. Te world trade regime as a consequence has become much freer than ever before. By ensuring the most favoured nation (MFN) treatment, the WTO has created a non-discriminatory trading regime. As a consequence of such increase in market access, Indian manufacturing sector may presumably have succeeded in exploiting the advantages of greater degree of openness for increasing its manufacturing exports. Tis chapter therefore will attempt to evaluate the kinds of quantitative and qualitative changes that may have taken place in the direction and the patterns of trade and resource allocation in Indian manufacturing. Te chapter will provide a brief overview of the post-UR market access situations in both the developed and the developing economies; will discuss India’s role in the WTO policy negotiations for manufacturing market access and also how India had responded to its commitments in the implementation of the reform measures; will we try to provide some quantitative estimates of the efects of increased market access for Indian manufacturing under the assumptions of competitive market framework and constant returns to scale; will try to incorporate monopolistic market conditions and increasing returns to scale to fnd out if the conclusions based on competition difer greatly in presence of market imperfections and increasing returns to scale. We ewill end the chapter with a summary our main fndings. MARKET ACCESS IN MANUFACTURING: AN OVERVIEW Te issue of the reduction of tarifs on industrial products assumed the centrality of negotiations on trade liberalisation since the GATT days, understandably due to fact that manufacturing products account for about 8 per cent of the global merchandise trade. A comparison of the share of exports of manufactures in total world exports in 1990 and 2000 reveals that the manufacturing share far exceeded the overall share in exports for the Western Europe and Asia and just exceeded in case of the North America. What this implies