ASEAN-China Environmental Cooperation Forum 2014

 President Xi Jinping (right) visits the Chinese National Engineering Research Center for Control and Treatment of Heavy Metal Pollution at Central South University in Changsha, Hunan Province, on November 4, 2013 (WANG YE)
　　Among the 40,000 or so residents in Dapu Town in Hengyang, central China's Hunan Province, more than 300 children were diagnosed with excessive lead in their blood earlier this year. In the most severe cases, blood lead levels hit 322 micrograms per liter, far exceeding the limits of the healthy range—100 micrograms per liter. Since it is difficult to rid oneself of heavy metals through normal metabolization, the harm they inflict on these children could conceivably continue for years.
　　While the pursuit of effective approaches to alleviate environmental pollution are underway, similar scandals such as the German village of Wewelsfleth, dubbed "the village of cancer patients" as virtually every household in the area contains a member afflicted by the condition, have continued to rear their ugly head in almost every corner of the world, especially in relatively less developed countries and regions.
　　On September 17 and 18, carrying the theme "National Strategy and Regional Cooperation for Sustainable Development: New Challenges and New Opportunities," the ASEAN-China Environmental Cooperation Forum 2014 was held in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
　　With the participation of more than 200 experts, entrepreneurs and government leaders from across the world, more opportunities have been created to facilitate exchanges of information and to introduce the relevant expertise and technologies to China.
　　"The Asia-Pacific region has contributed greatly to the momentum of the world economic recovery and sustainable growth. However, global challenges such as climate change, ecological degradation and the energy crisis have become increasingly formidable, calling for global economic and environmental governance," said Li Ganjie, China's Vice Minister of Environmental Protection, at the opening ceremony of the forum.
　　Teaming up in Guangxi
　　Since the forum was established three years ago, it has served as an important platform for high-level dialogues concerning environmental policies and cooperation. To reinforce regional green development, Li suggested pushing for the establishment of a regional community of environmental cooperation by building a "green maritime silk road" through concerted efforts of all concerned parties, shaping a multi-layer cooperative network through intensifying policy exchanges and capacity improvement, and taking the initiative to extend partnership on environment-related technological and industrial cooperation.
　　At the opening ceremony, Vice Chairman of the Guangxi Regional Government Tang Renjian, expressed hopes for the creation of a new pattern of cooperation to make regional sustainable development a reality.
　　Tang held that China and the ASEAN should promote the establishment of a green development demonstration area and focus on the development of low-carbon recycling economy, agritourism, as well as intensifying green trade and cooperation. Beyond that, he opined more input should be generated in terms of bilateral exchanges on biological diversity and ecological protection.
　　Inar Ichsana Ishak, Assistant Minister of Socio-Cultural and Environment Health of Indonesia, believed that all-round cooperation encompassing green food production and infrastructure should be carried out to achieve sustainable urban development. "In recent years, Indonesia has adjusted related legislation and policies to solve environmental problems," she said.
　　ASEAN members and China are facing three historic opportunities in intensifying environmental sustainability, said Kaveh Zahedi, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific. "The prospective China-ASEAN economic community will propel the region into an engine for world economy and for green growth, which will significantly benefit local people," he said.
　　Sanath Ranawana, a senior specialist on natural resources management from the Asian Development Bank, suggested that the bank be prepared to give further consideration to regional cooperation and investment in building cross-border natural protection areas and safeguarding biological diversity.
　　Land contamination
　　A survey released in April by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection and Ministry of Land and Resources showed that 16.1 percent of the country's land had been affected by heavy metal contamination. It revealed that the quality of arable land in the wastelands of mining and metallurgical industries is worrisome.
　　Among all inorganic pollutants, heavy metals, a term referring to metals that weigh over 5 grams per cubic centimeter, present the greatest danger to the health of animals, plants and human beings. If mercury is absorbed by the root system of a plant and then disseminated, its leaves, flowers and stems will typically turn brown or black, its growth will be retarded and more importantly, its fruits will contain mercury.
　　"In China, land contamination is characterized by the coexistence of new and old pollutants and the mixture of organic and inorganic pollutants," said Zhang Weili, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
　　Aside from the development of mining and mineral industries, agriculture is another source of pollution, for most Chinese farmers are preoccupied with the effects of chemical fertilizers on grain output.
　　Zhang Fusuo, a professor at the College of Resources and Environmental Sciences at the Beijing-based China Agricultural University, pointed out that China only accounts for 10 percent of the total arable land in the world, but consumes more than one third of the total chemical fertilizers used. While its grain output grew 150 percent from 1980 to 2008, its consumption of chemical manure also tripled.
　　Soil pollution affects the quality of surface and underground water, and contaminates agricultural products. However, the treatment of pollution necessitates huge inputs of funds and resources.
　　At present, most related remediation technologies are still in the experimental stage, and thus far, there has been no case of successful heavy metal pollution treatment in China, said Liu Shuai with the Hunan Provincial Environmental Protection and Resources Conservation Commission.
　　"China's environmental sustainability has captured the attention of overseas Chinese entrepreneurs who are willing to shepherd funds into related fields such as the research and development of environmentally sound technologies," said Qiao Lihua, an overseas Chinese who migrated to the United States in 1986 and went on to found his own real estate company.
　　"On the front of heavy metal pollution treatment, China is in its infancy, we can bring about our technologies and share it with Chinese and ASEAN people," said Michael Gianchetta, Vice President of Gianco, an environmental services company in the United States.
　　Gianchetta said that the United States has accumulated rich experience and developed advanced technologies in the field of heavy metal pollution prevention and control, which have been employed in the effective treatment of mining and metallurgical wastes. "We are expecting more concerted efforts from China as well as ASEAN members in combating heavy metal pollution," he added.

Finder of Financial Fault Lines

Finder of Financial Fault Lines

Finance & Development, March 2015, Vol. 52, No. 1

Laura Wallace

PDF version

Laura Wallace profiles Raghuram Rajan, the prescient finance economist now steering India’s central bank
Raghuram Rajan, now the head of India’s central bank, was the IMF’s youngest, and first nonwestern, chief economist.
But when Rajan, then 40, turned up at the IMF’s Washington headquarters in 2003, many of his peers thought he had entered the wrong building. The finance professor from the University of Chicago was reporting to work as the new economic counsellor and director of the Research Department. But although he was a highly regarded finance economist, he was filling a job that had always been held by a leading macroeconomist. And to the macroeconomists who populate the IMF, Rajan was an unknown entity.
But the IMF picked Rajan for a reason: it wanted to build up its financial expertise in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Anne Krueger, then the IMF’s second in command as first deputy managing director, had recently read a book Rajan coauthored with Luigi Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (2003), so she called Rajan. When asked if he would be interested in being chief economist, Rajan says he told her: “Well, Anne, I don’t know any macroeconomics.” To which Krueger joked, “Neither do I.” He decided to give it a shot and flew out for an interview.
A decade later, when Rajan reported for his first day as governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), no one doubted that he had entered the right building. It was as if all his academic work since his 1991 doctoral thesis on the dangers of cozy bank-firm relationships had been leading up to this day. Plus his stint at the IMF had given him valuable experience, not only in policymaking but in engaging with advanced economies. As one former colleague puts it, Rajan can stand his ground because “he isn’t in awe” of the major industrial powers. In addition, he was one of the few economists to have warned about the risks of financial innovation well before a devastating financial crisis hit the United States in 2007 and then disrupted the global economy.
The demands on, and expectations for, Rajan are high—domestically and globally. He is leading India’s central bank as the country tries to regain its economic momentum, and policymakers around the world look to him for guidance on reforming the global financial system. Unsurprisingly, the Chicago professor advocates free markets, but, as he wrote in the 2003 book, he also views the market as “a fragile institution, charting a narrow path between the Scylla of overweening government interference and the Charybdis of too little government support.”
That said, it is difficult to put Rajan into a particular economic camp. He likes to call himself “a pragmatist.” As he tells F&D: “It’s not just economics but the political layer that is imposed over it that determines outcomes—and the political layer is much less well understood than the economics. So when you combine the two, basically it’s a process of navigation. How do I make sure that sensible economics prevails?”

Saving capitalism

Rajan was born in Bhopal, in central India, in 1963, but spent much of his early youth in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Belgium (his father was with the foreign office) before returning to India at age 11. He says his fascination with finance dates to his graduate school days at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, which followed a bachelor’s in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. He recalls reading Nobel laureate Robert Merton’s theory of rational options pricing (a formula for evaluating options, which are contracts that give a buyer the right to buy or sell a financial asset at a set price in the future). He was struck, he said, not only by the theory’s “mathematical elegance” but also by “its usefulness in the real world.” In 1991, he received a doctorate in finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business—both institutions that attracted the top options-pricing researchers.
For most of the next 12 years, Rajan would make Booth his home, teaching banking and finance while undertaking much-cited work with such colleagues as Doug Diamond and Zingales. In January 2003, Rajan won the American Finance Association’s inaugural Fischer Black Prize for the leading finance researcher under 40, for “path-breaking contributions to our knowledge of financial institutions, the workings of the modern corporation, and the causes and consequences of the development of the financial sector across countries.”
The prize announcement noted that “even while many economists were extolling the virtues of bank finance, Rajan pointed out in his influential Ph.D. thesis that there might be a downside to cozy bank-firm relationships of the kind that one saw in Japan.” It goes on to cite his work with Diamond that “knits together the microtheory of banking with macroeconomic theory,” along with shedding more light on “the role banks play in the provision of liquidity, why this function makes banks so prone to systemic crises, and why changes in monetary policy have such a significant effect on bank lending.” And it cited his work with Zingales that provided “a new method of pinpointing the effect of institutions on economic growth” and showed that “industries dependent on external finance grow faster in countries that have a more developed financial system,” thereby helping to “debunk the belief that a country’s financial system is a sideshow with little effect on its economic growth.”
Rajan and Zingales built on these findings in their 2003 book, which argues that many countries have underdeveloped financial systems because of the political opposition of the elite, who fear losing their position if access to finance becomes freer and they face competition. Rajan believes that the book is just as relevant today given the post–financial crisis swing into what he considers “overtaxed and overregulated economies,” when what is really needed is “to keep our economies flexible to find the solutions.”
Rajan would go on to win numerous other awards, including India’s Infosys Prize for Social Sciences-Economics in 2011 and the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics in 2013. At the Frankfurt award ceremony, Diamond, one of the presenters, said Rajan’s work “always is done with a clear view of how the research topics and the results can help make the world a better place.” He also called Rajan “incredibly fair” and “the voice of reason in our faculty”—noting that at the University of Chicago, and especially at Booth, “he has hardly an enemy despite taking strong positions on controversial views.”

From academia to the IMF

In August 2003, Rajan took over as IMF chief economist from Harvard’s well-known Kenneth Rogoff. Rajan admits that “it was an interesting transition.” He recalls, with a smile, that “the reaction was—after Ken Rogoff, this gigantic macroeconomist—‘Who’s this guy?’ You know, ‘Rajan who?’” He says that “one of the first things that I had to establish was that I knew some macroeconomics,” and he worked hard to keep—and attract—a good team. “When people started wanting to come in [to the Research Department], I realized that we had turned the corner.”
With the global economy relatively calm—the turmoil finally subsiding from an Argentine default at the end of 2001—Rajan was able to step up financial sector research and explore how to integrate financial sector issues into the IMF’s economic country models. This might have seemed doable given that the IMF already had models for handling fiscal and monetary issues. But creating a model for financial issues turned out to be much tougher. As a result, while Rajan is credited with laying the groundwork, the issue is still very much a work in progress, not just for IMF researchers but for hundreds of academics.
The big difference is that a decade ago creating such a model lacked urgency, whereas now it is a high priority. As Rajan wrote in a Project Syndicate column in August 2013: “In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, macroeconomists tended to assume away the financial sector in their models of advanced economies. With no significant financial crisis since the Great Depression, it was convenient to take for granted that the financial plumbing worked in the background. Models, thus simplified, suggested policies that seemed to work—that is, until the plumbing backed up. And the plumbing malfunctioned because herd behavior—shaped by policies in ways that we are only now coming to understand—overwhelmed it.”
IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard says that “we’ve made a lot of progress in how we look at the financial system, at isolating some kinds of risks, and getting the data that allow us to do more work in real time. But it’s not as if we have a complete understanding of the issues, and the integration of the two is progressing but it’s not there yet.” The fundamental problem, Blanchard says, is that “we’re not sure what financial stability means.” He also worries that a macrofinancial model could remain elusive—that “it’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game forever”—because “maybe if we identify the risks today, maybe in two years it’s a different set of risks in a different part” of the financial system.
What makes Rajan a key figure in these financial debates is what some colleagues say is his ability to see the forest for the trees. Stijn Claessens, an assistant director of the IMF’s Research Department, says Rajan is one of “a small set of people who academically as well as professionally have the skills to be able to talk about macroeconomics and know finance in the sense of the institutional details, plus see the links and how they interface and work together.” Says Chicago’s Anil Kashyap (also a Rajan coauthor): “The arguments about setting interest rates are usually pretty simple. In contrast, the evolving debate over how to deliver financial stability is much more nuanced, in part because we do not have a standard workhorse model to rely upon. Raghu has the great advantage of having a clear vision of the financial system and what does well and where it poses challenges. I think this is why he has been at the forefront of many of the financial stability debates.”

Showdown at Jackson Hole

Not that Rajan’s vision is always well received. In August 2005, he came in for heavy criticism following what turned out to be a prescient speech about the dangers lurking in the financial system. He was invited to speak on how the financial system had evolved under Alan Greenspan (the soon-to-retire chairman of the Federal Reserve Board) at the annual symposium of central bankers and other high-powered economists in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He says he had expected to find that the dramatic expansion in financial markets had reduced the risks for banks, but instead, the figures that his staff assembled showed the opposite.
With Greenspan in the audience, Rajan delivered a talk based on his paper “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” He warned that recent financial innovations (such as credit default swaps, which act as insurance against bond defaults) could create “a greater (albeit still small) probability of a catastrophic meltdown.” This message did not go down well in some quarters. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called Rajan’s premise “slightly Luddite” and “largely misguided.” Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Donald Kohn suggested that Rajan was nostalgic for the old days of bank-dominated systems—which Rajan strongly denied.
Rajan has written that he left Wyoming with some unease—not because of the criticism, but because “the critics seemed to be ignoring what was going on before their eyes” (see box). Several years later, his warning came true: the U.S. market for subprime mortgage securities began to implode in 2007, leading to the global financial crisis.

Not ready for the red flags

Was there anything Raghuram Rajan could have done to ensure that his message was heard at Jackson Hole? He thinks not, for two reasons.
First, economic times were good, so it was difficult to persuade people to take steps that might slow growth to address a low-probability risk. After all, the Federal Reserve had just dealt with the dot-com crisis by pumping liquidity into the market, and there was a widely held view that “if another crisis erupted, it could be dealt with in the same way—even though the problem this time was bank credit, not a loss of market value,” he tells F&D.
Second, the remarks were delivered at a fete honoring Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who held a widely shared belief “that the key players in the financial system had no incentive to go off track”—and trying to convince the audience otherwise was a tall order. “These are smart guys. They’re from Goldman Sachs. They’re from JPMorgan. They’re paid a ton of money. They’re the smartest kids in the room. Why would they blow up their business? And who are we, you know, low-paid regulators, thinking that we know more about their business than they do? And the answer is no, we don’t know more about their business than they do, but we have different incentives. They’re locked into this competitive frenzy. And we’re the guys who can stop them.”

Of course, Rajan’s time at the IMF was about far more than Jackson Hole. He says it was a tremendous on-the-job learning experience during which he sharpened his macroeconomic skills. He also immersed himself in the art of global economic policymaking—for example, leading a team to try to help some major economies reduce their huge (and unprecedented) balance of payments imbalances. It was also his first stint as a manager—a hundred people worked for him in the Research Department. But that number must now seem incredibly small, as he oversees 17,000 staffers at the RBI.
Former IMF colleagues say that what is so remarkable about Rajan is his humility, integrity, and intellectual curiosity and rigor. Jonathan Ostry, a deputy director of the Research Department, says that Rajan “will let people go forward with their ideas, giving them virtually all of the credit, even when he had significant input.” He was also “willing to take controversial positions both internally and, within the limits of his position, externally, to an extent that, frankly, I’d never seen before.”
In December 2006, with his IMF contract done, Rajan returned to Chicago, where he had the time and academic freedom to delve further into the repercussions of financial innovation. The result was Fault Lines, which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs prize for best business book in 2010. Rajan cautions against making the financial sector (“bankers gone mad”) the scapegoat for the crisis, because the blame rests with complex and wide-ranging fault lines that include
● domestic political pressures (arising from income inequality) that create easy credit;
● export-led growth strategies (as in China, Germany, and Japan) that rely on indebted U.S. consumers; and
● greater financial risk-taking fed by a belief that governments will save the day.

Back to India

Rajan may have made his career in the United States, but he never forgot India, making it a frequent topic of speeches and research. He says that he was drawn to economics because it offered a way to help India enter the “pantheon of nations.” In 2008 he got the chance to help shape India’s financial sector when he chaired a high-level government committee on financial sector reforms. The committee report, “A Hundred Small Steps,” suggested that the RBI should target a single objective—low and stable inflation—rather than juggling multiple mandates (such as inflation, the exchange rate, and capital flows).
It also proposed that India promote the availability of financial services—including credit, saving, and insurance products—to a wider number of people (especially in rural areas, where most people lack access to formal sources of credit and insurance); reduce the heavy government presence in the banking system; and step up foreign participation in its financial markets.
In September 2013, he took the helm at the RBI, after five years of advising Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from Chicago and a year as chief economic advisor in the Finance Ministry in Mumbai. At that point, India’s markets were in turmoil because of rising inflation, large fiscal and current account deficits, and a slowdown in growth. But he moved quickly to stabilize the rupee, reduce inflation sharply, and build up foreign exchange reserves—earning him the sobriquet “rock star” in the local media. He also wasted no time in laying the groundwork for adopting an inflation target and is pursuing many other reforms suggested in “A Hundred Small Steps.”
Rajan’s hope is that the RBI can help India create jobs by ensuring macroeconomic stability. In the process, World Bank Chief Economist Kaushik Basu hopes that Rajan can encourage the RBI to be “a bit more experimental.” Basu, who preceded Rajan as India’s chief economic advisor, says emerging market economies need not rely so heavily on the monetary practices that worked well in the major industrial countries, although the risks of central banking efforts to guide an economy are such that “most central banks play it tame by going by those rules.” Basu says central banks might say, “This policy worked very well in a rich country but may not work well in my country, and I’m going to try a slightly different intervention in the interest rates,” playing around “with new policies to see if they work. Raghu is in a position to do that given his background.”
In global financial circles, Rajan made headlines early in 2014, when he told Bloomberg TV India that “international monetary cooperation has broken down”—a reference to the Federal Reserve’s indication that it was contemplating withdrawing some of the stimulus it had employed to reinvigorate the U.S. economy. Later, he publicly scolded the major central banks for focusing solely on what was good for their own economies without taking into account the financial turmoil their low-interest-rate policies were unleashing in emerging market economies. These economies had to cope with massive inflows of funds seeking higher yields. And he is calling for central banks in countries that are the source of those funds “to reinterpret their mandates to consider the medium-term effects of recipient countries’ policy responses, such as sustained exchange rate intervention.”
As Rajan put it in a June 2013 lecture at the Bank for International Settlements: “In a world integrated by massive capital flows, monetary policy in large countries serves as a common accelerator pedal for the globe. One’s car might languish in a deep ditch even when the accelerator pedal is fully pressed down, but the rest of the world might be pushed way beyond the speed limit. If there is little way for countries across the globe to avoid the spillover effects of unconventional policies emanating from the large central banks, should the large central banks internalize these spillovers? How? And will it be politically possible?”
Rajan now has an opportunity afforded few academics—to put in practice what he has long preached. The RBI (as well as central banks in other emerging market economies) may not be the most powerful car on the block, but for Rajan, this chance to be an exemplary driver is the opportunity of a lifetime!

GLOBAL EMISSION BY COUNTRY

 GLOBAL EMISSION BY COUNTRY






Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have significantly increased since 1900. Emissions increased by over 16 times between 1900 and 2008 and by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.
“Emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases have also increased significantly since 1900. To learn more about past and projected global emissions of non-CO2 gases, please see the EPA (Environment Protection Agency )report.

2008 Global CO₂ Emissions from Fossil Fuel Combustion and some Industrial Processes (million metric tons of CO₂)

Source: National CO₂ Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, Cement Manufacture, and Gas Flaring: 1751-2008.

In 2008, the top carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitters were China, the United States, the European Union, India, the Russian Federation, Japan, and Canada. These data include CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion, as well as cement manufacturing and gas flaring. Together, these sources represent a large proportion of total global CO₂ emissions.
Emissions and sinks related to changes in land use are not included in these estimates. However, changes in land use can be important - global estimates indicate that deforestation can account for 5 billion metric tons of CO₂ emissions, or about 16% of emissions from fossil fuel sources. Tropical deforestation in Africa, Asia, and South America are thought to be the largest contributors to emissions from land-use change globally. In areas such as the United States and Europe, changes in land use associated with human activities have the net effect of absorbing CO₂, partially offsetting the emissions from deforestation in other regions.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT FOR WOMEN IN INDIA

Human Development for women in India.

Today is International Women’s Day. Each year International Women's Day (IWD) is celebrated on March 8. The first International Women's Day was held in 1911. Thousands of events occur to mark the economic, political and social achievements of women. Organisations, governments, charities, educational institutions, women's groups, corporations and the media celebrate the day.

The UN theme for International Women's Day 2015 is "Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it!" Governments and activists around the world will commemorate the 20th anniversary year of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, an historic roadmap that sets the agenda for realizing women's rights.
The International Woman’s Day theme for 2015 is ‘Make It Happen’ with a dedicated hashtag for social media.

All know its significance but most of the people do not aware about the factual figures.

India ranks 135^th in case of world rank in human development index whose value is 0.586 and India belongs to Medium Human Development Countries. But India is improving its index because from 2000 to 2013 India’s human development index increased at the rate of 1.49% per year but its rank could not improve too much. Remind that India’s female human development index is now 0.519 as against 0.629 for male human development index where the female expected years of schooling is 11.3 as against 11.8 for men . Female literacy rate in India is 65.46% as against 82.14 % for male. The male literacy rate is growing at the rate of 6.9% whereas female literacy rate becomes 11.8% per annum. Female life expectancy is 57.7 years in comparison to 54.9 years for male. In 2013, India’s gender inequality index is 0.563 whose world rank is 127^th.India’s female labour force is 28.8% which is too lower than men. Women’s share in Parliament is only 10.9%. India’s adult mortality per 1000 for male is 247 but for female it is only 159.But the suicide rate of female  per lakh is only 7.8 which is too lower than the male of 13.0.The human development report-2014 says that the overall gender gap is 8% deficit. For women per capita income of women is half than that of men. So to reduce the gap , 4% of its GDP is required. The deprivation of women in innumerable both in livelihood or in social security in which dalit women suffers too much in education, job availability,sexual oppression and social crime or violence against dalit women , for example, verbal abuse (62.4%),physical assult(54.8%),sexual harassment and assult(46.8%) domestic violence(43%) and rape(23.2%) respectively.    

Gender equality is not just a condescending goal anymore; it is the necessary missing link for sustainable development, which is now been agreed by all. Reducing gender inequality gives women more money to spend on food, housing and education – essential component for reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development. The consensus is growing: getting more women into the workforce is one of the cure to many economic ills and imperative to sustainable development. If economic growth is to be achieved without social development at the grassroots level, it will not only widen inequality but also give rise to socioeconomic paranoia, socio-political unrest and instability. Growth and progression without development will have dangerous socio-political consequences that could undermine the very essence of freedom and democracy and deepen inequality.

Emphasis on gender budgeting and climate finance for women may have new light for women development in a sustainable manner.

INDIA'S TRADE SCENARIO

INDIA’S TRADE SCENARIO

India’s import grew higher than export in most of the decades,therefore, India is structurally a deficit country in trade.

 Its negative trade balance is increasing by degrees although it improved marginally in 2013.India’s merchandise trade balance is positive with developed north America and with Southern Asia only and it is negative with the rest of the other regions.

Since India’s trade is  service sector led ,then it is shown that service trade balance of India is on the upward trend although it trends downward since 2010 due to financial crises.India’s service exports contain 33.7% in computer and information  technology followed by other business 31.4% ,travel 12.3% and so on .

On the other hand, service imports contain 46.9% in transportation followed by other business 23.2% and travel 9.6% respectively.It is noted that India was the largest exporter worldwide of computer and information services in 2012 and India’s largest import in 2013 was in oils and minerals.  

MACRO FUNDAMENTAL OF THE BUDGET 2015-16

Macro Fundamental of the Budget-2015-16

It is claimed that the Indian budget has emphasized the macro fundamentals but it is not the full story. India’s savings and Investment rates are both declining. In 2011-12,saving rate was 33% of GDP which was reduced to 31.1% in 2012-13 and to 30% in 2013-14 respectively. On the contrary, Gross fixed capital formation was 33.6% of GDP in 2011-12 which was declined to 31.9% in 2012-13,30.7% in 2013-14 and 29.8% in 2014-15 respectively.So,there saving investment gap which is volatile.India’s fiscal deficit as % of GDP was 6.68% in 2009-10,4.80% in 2010-11,5.75% in 2011-12, 4.82% in 2012-13, 5.41% in 2013-14 and 4.13% in 2014-15 respectively and the Government targets to achieve 3.6% in 2017 and 3% in 2018 respectively which are too much ambitious.Therefore India’s fiscal balance is also volatile and uncontrolled.Lastly India’s external balance is widening in case of trade balance but current account balance as % of GDP was -2.8% in 2010-11, -2.7% in 2011-12, -4.7% in 2012-13 and -1.7% in 2013-14 respectively which was marginally improved at present. Moreover, the growth rates of exports and imports became negative in 200-10and 2012-13 respectively  and growth of imports always exceeds exports and in real terms negative capital account balance is increasing. This is fundamental deficit in external sector in India. Thus in a macro economic sense, India is facing disequilibrium and is growing instability  while price stability or war on inflation is continuing. Although India’s growth of GDP is rising slowly except in the crisis period but the share of agriculture is falling steadily  and growth of industry is stagnant or slowing down. In this circumstances, this budget is crucial in the sense that it can boost in capital market too and a scope of new investment in social and infrastructure sectors too.But the domestic demand and supply in various sectors will mismatch. However, until and unless the fundamental disequilibrium is removed the sustainable development in India is doubtful.