Agricultural exports are seen as an important lever for equitable development of a nation, and India has witnessed a rapid increase in the same, especially in the last two decades, with government policies playing an important role. In this paper, we study the causal relationship between geography-related intellectual property rights (IPRs), commonly known as geographical indications (GIs), and agricultural exports. The number of agricultural GIs registered in India has increased from 0 in 2003 to over 100 in 2018. This is because the Indian government has actively promoted GIs as an export promotion tool. However, we have little empirical evidence linking GIs to increased agricultural exports. We combine the state-product-year level export data with data on registered GIs from 2004 to 2016 to study whether GIs lead to greater agricultural exports. GIs indicate quality, and thereby protect consumers from duplicates and counterfeits; they also standardise the production process. In fact, a ‘GI tag’ may also result in better marketing of the product, and increased information dissemination about it. Literature studying GI and its impacts has been limited, specifically within the Indian context. There have only been a few product-specific case studies, like that on Darjeeling tea, Basmati rice and Kodagu coffee. Therefore, this is one of the first papers to study the causal impact of GI on agricultural export. Besides, we also study institutional and infrastructure-related complementarities linking GIs to exports. Some of our salient findings include a strong positive causal impact of GI on agricultural exports. Secondly, there seems to be a complementary effect of the transport infrastructure and judicial efficiency on the impact of GI. Thirdly, the effect of government-owned GIs seems to be relatively higher in terms of agricultural exports, as opposed to their private counterparts. Fourth, there is a shift towards GI-tagged products in the cropping pattern, albeit limited to the district level. From these results, we assume that they are robust to the inclusion of a rich set of state-product, product-year and state-year fixed effects.
