Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

I'm sure you would have enjoyed and learnt a lot from Vijay Sarma's guest lecture today. For those of you who are still thinking of SEZ's this website provides more information at the policy level. Of course you could just google SEZ's to get many more websites with pertinent information.

In particular, several of you were wondering as to what the envisaged benefits of SEZ's were. Here is what this website has to say about this:


"(a) generation of additional economic activity
(b) promotion of exports of goods and services;
(c) promotion of investment from domestic and foreign sources;
(d) creation of employment opportunities;
(e) development of infrastructure facilities;

It is expected that this will trigger a large flow of foreign and domestic investment in SEZs, in infrastructure and productive capacity, leading to generation of additional economic activity and creation of employment opportunities."


As you can see, theoretically SEZ's can potentially confer a multitude of benefits - I think Vijay raised most of these benefits in class today. However the reality can be different. Comments?