Economy
Are fears of global recession real?
ECONOMISTS and business analysts around the world are coming to terms with the fact that the global economy has arguably entered a period of recession and uncertainty. The collapse of communism had ushered in a globalised economy in the 1990s triggering
an expansion in world trade and a great volume of American investments into developing countries. The remarkable economic growth of the past decade was indeed, in part, due to the globalisation of trade that removed barriers between countries. From the
end of 2000, there has been a marked stagnation in most economies, raising serous fears about the onset of a slowdown.
Policy of national interest
NATIONAL interest can change a countrys policy. This is how the Pakistani President, Gen Pervez Musharraf, has defended his decision to support America. His is a brazen statement because the Taliban is a creation of Pakistan. It gave the Afghan irregular
s military and economic assistance to come to power. Even the Pakistani forces fought against what is known as the Northern Alliance to confine it to only 10 per cent of Afghanistan.
World Bank shift gears unobtrusively
WITH the Washington Consensus of policy-based lending strategy of the Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank increasingly under siege from a growing number of disaffected countries, the protest demonstration
s by anti-globalisation campaigners continue to hog the headlines wherever these development institutions congregate.
Management
Competitive advantage: Alternative scenarios
COMPETITIVE advantage is now an accepted buzzword in the strategic management jargon. Michael Porter of Harvard Business School elaborated on this concept in Competitive Strategy, CS, (1980), Competitive Advantage, CA, (1985) and The Competitive Advantag
e of Nations, CAN, (1990), apart from articles in professional journals. In CS (1980), Porter developed the concept for the domestic performance of industries and firms.
Politics
Vision thing
I now understand why the senior Mr George Bush, when he was the US President, was riled by the `vision thing'. Everybody -- beginning from the perennial schoolboy to the pontificating academic -- is mouthing it. It ranks next only to `paradigm', `strateg
ic', `transparency' and other buzzwords spewed by people from the top of their heads without thinking.
The opiate
DO TERRORISTS make good rulers? I know they are good at terror but do they actually administer the country they have won over by terrorism? Do they feed and educate the people they rule? We know from their latest statements that they love dying while the
Americans love living. It is much harder to live than to die.
Terrorism
Regional war with global reach
THE air and missile attacks the US has launched on Afghanistan will have far-reaching implications for regional and global security. In the short term, its effects on the world economy, already drifting toward a recession, will be destabilising for many
nations, especially the developing countries. The US President, Mr George W. Bush, has repeatedly emphasised over the last three weeks that what Washington wanted was not merely a revenge for the attacks on its citadels of power and prosperity and making
Americans feel insecure in their own homeland, but to wage a long, relentless war against terrorism with its global ramifications. It is designed to be a war, not in the conventional sense, but one that relies on all instruments political, diplomatic,
intelligence sharing, freezing of the financial assets of terrorist outfits and military operations to achieve the goal of eliminating terrorism from the face of the earth..
