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%
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