18.04.2007

• Orange Prize
• Kiran Desai is nominated for the Orange Prize for fiction, awarded every year to a woman novelist writing in English, for her Booker Prize winning novel, “The Inheritance of Loss.”
• What is Nor’easter?
• Today’s paper reported “after a rare spring Nor’easter hit … knocking out electricity to more than 1.3 mln customers …” Are you not curious what is a nor’easter?
• A nor'easter (also northeaster) is a macro-scale storm whose winds come from the northeast, especially in the coastal areas of the Northeastern United States and Atlantic Canada. More specifically, it describes a low pressure area whose center of rotation is just off the coast and whose leading winds in the left forward quadrant rotate onto land from the northeast. The precipitation pattern is similar to other extratropical storms. They also can cause coastal flooding, coastal erosion and gale force winds.
• World Toilet Summit!!!
• India is hosting this summit for 2007 at New Delhi from November 1 to 4.
• What other summits should we live to see; I wonder.
• FDI in courier industry
• Government may lower the FDI limit from 100% to 49%.
• EICI – Express Industry Council of India, the umbrella organization representing both domestic and international courier companies in India is opposing the move, as it is a retrograde step.
• Satwant Reddy Committee
• It is examining whether MNCs should be allowed to guard their costly clinical data from local rivals.
• This is unlikely to take a call on the issue immediately, as the government seems to be wary of raising another controversy by granting data exclusivity.
• Why is restricting the tax pass-through for venture funds a bad idea?
• Firstly, tax pass-through is not a tax concession. The profits generated by the venture funds do attract tax, at the time these are transferred to the investors in the fund. Collective investment vehicles marry investment expertise with pooled capital. Tax should not spoil such socially benign unions.
• Secondly, there is no rationale for privileging additional incomes created in one sector over another. Wherever enterprise flowers, capital availability and infrastructure should nourish it; society badly needs the jobs and incomes it generates.
• Thirdly, the proposed taxation of venture funds would bite only in the case of domestic funds. Foreign funds would laugh all the way to their banks in tax-free havens like Mauritius. This drives Indian venture capitalists out of India.
• Myths in monetary policy making
• It is a very good article written by Ashima Goel. Read the full article here.
• “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.” These are the famous words of the villainous character Goldfinger in the movie James Bond.
• Definition of FDI
• OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) defines foreign direct investment as obtaining a lasting interest by a resident in one economy in any entity resident in another economy. The lasting interest implies the existence of a long-term relationship between the investor and the invested entity and a significant degree of influence on the management.
• Until 2000 FDI that came into the country was classified under four board categories that included the government approval route, RBI approval, NRI and acquisition of shares.
• Since 2000, in line with the best international practices, the government adopted a new definition to include equity capital of unincorporated bodies, reinvested earnings and other capital, which pertains to inter-company debt transfers of FDI entities.