India’s trade with CIS countries.

CIS stands for Commonwealth of Independent States and all republics of central Asia are its members, including Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Baltic of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. During the Soviet era, all links with the USSR republics happened only through Moscow. As a result, a lot depended on the Indo-Soviet relationship since its nature determined India's relation with its republics. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, India's trading relations with the republics of central Asia have declined considerably. Only US$ 100 million worth of bilateral trade has taken place between India and central Asia. The main items being exported from India are tea, woolen goods, cosmetics, ready made garments, leather goods, chemicals, jute manufacture, cotton yarns, machine tools, machinery, pharmaceuticals, plastic products, rice, electronic goods, instruments, and chemicals. To increase bilateral relations between India and central Asia, joint commissions have been set up in the various countries. Delegations have also done their bit by taking part in talks in order to increase trade value.

Describe the major issues in the world trade highlighting the growing popularity of regional arrangements, globalization, electronic commerce and environment. Also outline briefly the recent trends in world trade.

Regional arrangements:

The foreign ministers of the seven South Asian countries during the inaugural session signed two conventions.  One on preventing and combating trafficking in women and children for prostitution and the other on regional arrangements for the promotion of child welfare in South Asia. Trafficking of women and children, and child welfare, have remained a common problem to the South Asian region, home to one-fifth of the world population. Expressing hope that the signing of the conventions would contribute in welfare of women and children, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba laid foremost priorityon poverty reduction in the region where more than half a billion people earn less than $1 a day. “We must expand production and markets, increase trade, raise incomes and consumption, as well as pro-poor policies,” he said. Deuba highlighted the need to empower people with better education and health services, widening of job market . While we seek to expand trade outside the region, efforts must be exerted to stimulate regional trade. To achieve that, we should finalise the South Asian Preferential Trade Arrangement (SAFTA)framework treaty, fix priority and sequence execution, he said. Deuba also took up the “visionary goal” of establishing South Asian Economic Union.

Globalization

Globalization is what we call the process of the world becoming a smaller place. This is happening more and more and in many different ways, with results both good and bad: people move around more than ever; our society is increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse; we have instant access to information from anywhere in the world via satellite television and the internet; we’re increasingly governed by international organizations and trade agreements rather than national governments; and most of our goods, and even many of our services, come from the other side of the world.It’s this last form of globalization – economic globalization – that is the most controversial. Unemployment is high in North America, while manufacturing jobs are continually outsourced to the developing world. Technical jobs and support services are increasingly moving to India and Southeast Asia. And endless boatloads of cheap goods, often produced in sweatshops in a modern equivalent of serfdom or even slave labour, flood into our stores at low prices. But even beyond the ethical arguments against sweatshop labour, I would argue that economic globalization is neither sustainable nor resilient.

Electronic commerce

The Internet is not the Wild West contrary to what many people think. It is in fact heavily regulated. This is due in the main because the existing laws relating to say for example the sale of goods will apply to sales over the internet as well as the possibility of two countries laws being applicable to a particular contract.Legislators were concerned. As a consequence a significant amount of legislation was introduced on a pan European basis which sought to provide a framework and safety net for ecommerce

Environment

Major controversy surrounding trade and the environment centers on the WTO Secretariat's current position that countries cannot put up barriers to products based on the process of how they were made. The primary concern is that if such exceptions were allowed, countries would make them very freely and thus create a barrier to trade. In PIPA’s 1999 and 2004 trade polls, strong majorities rejected the WTO Secretariat's position that, in general, countries should not be able to restrict imports based on the environmental effects of their production, even though the argument defending the WTO position also mentioned the potential costs to the economy and job.

The Recent Trends in World Trade:

World trade flows are continuing their recovery, building on the large gains of 2010, with slower but still slightly above average growth in 2011. However, recent events in the Middle East and Japan have raised the level of global economic uncertainty and tilted the balance of risk towards the downside.

WTO economists’ baseline projections for world merchandise trade in 2011 would see exports grow by 6.5%, with shipments from developed countries increasing by around 4.5% and those from developing economies and the CIS advancing 9.5%

Curbing Corruption.

Corruption is a significant problem in India and much of the developing world. The inefficiencies engendered by corruption can be a significant drain on local development. While policymakers and the man on the street recognize the importance of the problem, the solution to the problem is quite tricky and, as a result, evades consensus on how best to reduce the menace. A recent economic research concludes that the right combination of external audit and grassroots monitoring by community members, and careful implementation of the same may be effective in reducing corruption.

One approach to reducing corruption suggests that the right combination of monitoring and punishments can control corruption. In practice, however, the very individuals tasked with monitoring and enforcing punishments may themselves be corruptible. In that case, increasing the chances that a low-level official would be monitored by a higher-level official would result only in bribes and other such forms of transfers between the officials, not in a reduction in corruption.

An alternative approach to reducing corruption, which has gained prominence in recent years, is to increase grassroots participation by community members in local-level monitoring. Community participation is now regarded, in much of the development community, as the key not only to reduced corruption but also to improved public service delivery more generally. For example, the entire World Development Report 2004 is devoted to the idea of “putting poor people at the centre of service provision: enabling them to monitor and discipline service providers, amplifying their voice in policymaking and strengthening the incentives for service providers to serve the poor”. The idea behind the grassroots approach is that community members are the people who benefit from a successful programme; therefore, they would have stronger incentives to monitor corruption at the local level than disinterested central government bureaucrats.

Critically examines the approaches to social problems and brings out their inadequacies.

Social problems, also called social issues, affect every society, great and small. Even in relatively isolated, sparsely populated areas, a group will encounter social problems. Part of this is due to the fact that any members of a society living close enough together will have conflicts. It’s virtually impossible to avoid them, and even people who live together in the same house don’t always get along seamlessly. On the whole though, when social problems are mentioned they tend to refer to the problems that affect people living together in a society.

The list of social problems is huge and not identical from area to area. In the US, some predominant social issues include the growing divide between rich and poor, domestic violence, unemployment, pollution, urban decay, racism and sexism, and many others. Sometimes social issues arise when people hold very different opinions about how to handle certain situations like unplanned pregnancy. While some people might view abortion as the solution to this problem, other members of the society remain strongly opposed to its use. In itself, strong disagreements on how to solve problems create divides in social groups.

Other issues that may be considered social problems aren't that common in the US and other industrialized countries, but they are huge problems in developing ones. The issues of massive poverty, food shortages, lack of basic hygiene, spread of incurable diseases, ethnic cleansing, and lack of education inhibits the development of society. Moreover, these problems are related to each other and it can seem hard to address one without addressing all of them.

It would be easy to assume that a social problem only affects the people whom it directly touches, but this is not the case. Easy spread of disease for instance may tamper with the society at large, and it’s easy to see how this has operated in certain areas of Africa. The spread of AIDs for instance has created more social problems because it is costly, it is a danger to all members of society, and it leaves many children without parents. HIV/AIDs isn’t a single problem but a complex cause of numerous ones. Similarly, unemployment in America doesn’t just affect those unemployed but affects the whole economy.

It’s also important to understand that social problems within a society affect its interaction with other societies, which may lead to global problems or issues. How another nation deals with the problems of a developing nation may affect its relationship with that nation and the rest of the world for years to come. Though the United States was a strong supporter of the need to develop a Jewish State in Israel, its support has come at a cost of its relationship with many Arabic nations.

Additionally, countries that allow multiple political parties and free expression of speech have yet another issue when it comes to tackling some of the problems that plague its society. This is diversity of solutions, which may mean that the country cannot commit to a single way to solve an issue, because there are too many ideas operating on how to solve it. Any proposed solution to something that affects society is likely to make some people unhappy, and this discontent can promote discord. On the other hand, in countries where the government operates independently of the people and where free speech or exchange of ideas is discouraged, there may not be enough ideas to solve issues, and governments may persist in trying to solve them in wrongheaded or ineffective ways.

The earliest approach to the study of social disorganization is that of the social problems. The problems were discussed without any particular sociological frame of reference both the facts and suggested reform programmes being taken from the fields in which the problems were found. Each problem was considered in complete isolation from others. It was assumed that society could progress if it would attack the mal-adjustment which delayed human advancement. Thus the social problems were the diseases of society which threatened the welfare of the group. This is not a scientific approach because social problems in one period of history are not so considered in another. Besides some of the so called social problems are not generally accepted as such. Therefore this approach is called evangelistic one. For all its imperfections and inadequacies the social problem approach contributed to the understanding of social disorganization paving the way for a more scientific analysis.

The second approach to the study of social disorganization is the bio-pyschological.It is the result of the development of the sciences; biology and psychology. The beginnings of this approach can be traced in the formulation of racial theories by Gobineau.He and his followers declared the theory that the decay of all societies is the result of racial intermixing. This is because that the races are not equal in capacity. The eugenists were of the view that there are biological differences not only between races but between individuals within the same race. Therefore society would take drastic steps to prevent conception among the mentally unfit. This is only way open to solve social problems and for the prevention of social disorganization. This approach helps us to know that the disorganization of society is the direct result of deficiencies in the biological make-up passed on from generation through heredity. The third approach is geographical. Geographical factors such as land, water, rainfall, climate and soil decide the superiority of a given culture or the backwardness of people. The forms of social disorganization which are explained in terms of geographical factors are crime, cultural retardation, illiteracy, suicide, divorce and insanity. Geography imposes limitation to man's ingenuity but it does not determine the patterns of social adjustment.

The fourth approach to the study of social disorganization is cultural because it explains social problems in terms of cultural processes. Thus the different forms of social-organization show institutional malfunctioning.

The fifth approach is the cultural lag frame of reference. The term cultural lag explained by Ogburn is based upon the distinction between material and non-material culture. Rapid changes takes place in the material culture whereas slow changes in non-material culture. Changes in material culture necessitate related changes in non-material culture. According to this school the disorganization of the modern family is the result of a lag in the continued functioning of and failure to develop suitable substitutes for the old folkways and mores governing family relations. Cultural anthropologists attempt to broaden the concept cultural lag to include lack of harmonious functioning between two associated cultural traits. Thomas and Znaniecki in their Polish Peasant talk of the cultural approach. This may be called the culture conflict approach. According to them the social disorganization of the immigrant community is the result of conflict between the cultures of the old and the new worlds in which the control of the primary group breaks down.