FDI

love_gundu22

MP Guru
Hi kashish, there are attachments for you............. hope they will be helpful.
 

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love_gundu22

MP Guru
FDI in retail can boost farm sector

The Government seems to be in a fix over the issue of allowing FDI in retail. Conflicting reports have emerged in the last couple of weeks on the investment ceiling to be permitted for opening up the sector to foreign competition. While one report states that only 49% FDI will be allowed initially, another piece pegs that cap at 51%. Anything over 50% gives a company majority control. That would be fairly difficult to achieve given the stiff opposition from the Left parties, the chief prop of the Congress-led coalition. On the other hand, anything less than majority could keep big MNCs at bay. A few of them have made it clear that they won't enter the Indian retail sector unless given a majority control in their ventures. Which way the cookie will crumble only time will tell.

The media reports also talked of restrictions to be placed on foreign players. The Government may initially allow overseas retailers to set up shops only in major cities. Again, there will be limits on the number of outlets for each company, the size and nature of the outlets. Besides, FDI will be allowed in phases and in select areas only, something that China did when it allowed FDI in its retail sector back in 1992. Could it be that the New Delhi is following in the footsteps of the Middle Kingdom, which has benefited a great deal in the 13 years since it first dismantled the entry barrier in retail. Or, is it the fear of opposition by the communists that has prompted the Government to adopt a 'go slow' approach on this critical but controversial issue.

The Government's cautious stance on the politically sensitive issue is understandable since he Left parties have made no bones about their opposition to opening up retail to foreign investors. Their main fear is that the entry of MNC giants like Wal-Mart, Tesco and Carrefour will throw the hundreds of thousands of the neighborhood kirana store owners out of business, leading to millions of job losses. Another concern is with regard to the pricing power of the global retail giants which the communists say will squeeze out the suppliers and hurt farmers. The Left are also worried that the foreign retail majors will hurt domestic players with the practice of predatory pricing and become monopolies. Plus, they say most of these stores will be focused on major cities and big towns, resulting in a skewed urban development. "The negative effects in terms of job losses and the displacement of traditional supply chains by the monopoly power of multinational retailers far outweigh the supposed benefits..." the Left parties said in a recent note that reiterated their opposition against FDI in retail.

There are others who also argue against FDI in retail. And, they are the Indian retail players like Pantaloon. Though one must add that they are not totally against FDI in retail, but are seeking more time to scale up before they come face to face with their global counterparts. Pantaloon chief Kishore Biyani says its not whether FDI should be allowed in retail or not, but when and how. The Chinese allowed 100% FDI only in 2004. For a decade it allowed only one foreign outlet per province, something that the Indian Government is likely to emulate, when it formally announces the opening up of the sector to FDI. Biyani, also the Chairman of CII's retail panel, says Indian players need at least Rs200bn to build scale. Surely, they can't mop-up such huge sum of money in a few months. Even 2-3 years may not be enough. At least 5 years is what they are asking for. May be they are afraid of the global retail giants dominating the local landscape as they possess a lot of financial muscle vis-a-vis the Indian retailers.

But, if one looks at the experience of countries like China and the US, one gets a feeling that the apprehensions of the Left parties as well as the local retailers are misplaced. In America, which is by far the most matured retail market in the world, 95% of retailers are single store operations. Now, they may not be as small as our grocery shops, but are still small when looked at from the US perspective. Some of the world's largest retailers, like Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Target, etc. are American. Notwithstanding the dominance by these large players, the smaller 'mom-n-pop' stores still co-exist with them, though one may not find them in the same vicinity as the big retailers. And, even though their market share is getting eroded slowly, they still account for just under 50% of the total American retail trade.

Similarly in China, the top 10 retailers (both domestic and international), had only 9.6% share of the $628-bn retail market in 2004. This was up from 2.9% in 2000. Moreover, only 17 out of the total 78 foreign retailers in China are in this list, including Wal-Mart, Tesco, Metro and Carrefour. These 17 retailers totted up a turnover of $13.8bn, giving them a miniscule share of 2.2%. However, it must be noted here that the foreign retailers got full access to the Chinese market only last year and hence the above data must be looked at in a different angle i.e. against only the top 100 players. Seen through this prism, the foreign retailers' accounted for 23% sales while China's public sector retailers had a 32% market share and private retailers owned 45%.

Meanwhile, the kirana store owners in India also face a threat from the domestic players, who have aggressive expansion plans for the future. In addition, few of the country's large corporate houses like Reliance, the Tatas and the Munjals, etc. too have mega plans for the retail sector. So, the grocery shopkeepers will feel the heat from these companies in any case, which is a point the communists ally of the Government fail to appreciate. According to John Menzer, Vice-Chairman and CEO, Wal-Mart, "Small businesses have their own competitive advantages. They have their own model, offer a different product mix, and keep their customers happy. I think small businesses can grow and prosper with Wal-Mart". Even in China, where FDI in retail was allowed long time back, small vendors of vegetables and fruits coexist with the hundreds of superstores, who are perceived to be the biggest threat to the kirana shops. Even in India, where organised retailers have started mushrooming in big cities, the grocery shop owners have not been wiped out.

Those who are against FDI in retail are also missing an even bigger point. The one concerning backward linkages with the agriculture sector, efficiency in supply chain that foreign retailers can bring and the huge opportunity in farm exports. India can attain huge savings by merely improving the supply chain. Some 20-40% of all fruits and vegetables grown in the country goes waste due to poor transportation, storage and handling infrastructure. Also, for every rupee that an Indian consumer spends, the farmer gets only 20-22 paise, as against 70-80 paise in developed markets. If large retailers, whether domestic or foreign, directly source through farmers, realisations will go up for the farmers, consumers will have to pay less and the retailers will get higher margins.

Though one may argue that the supply chain efficiency can also be brought in by the local retailers too, the moot point is that the global giants like Wal-Mart can substantially improve the fortunes of India's farm sector by directly linking it with the global supply chain. Remember, China's agriculture exports to the US nearly trebled from $3.86bn in 1999 to $9.96bn last year. India, on the other hand has made only a marginal progress, with its farm exports to America rising from $3.19bn in 1999 to just $4.28bn.

In the recent past, the Prime Minister, the Finance Minister, the President, the Vice-President, the Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission, all have spoken of boosting agriculture growth to have a GDP growth in excess of 8% on a sustained basis. This Government came to power on the promise of making life better for the large section of India's rural poor. The retail sector is one such opportunity for the Congress-led coalition to turnaround the rural sector. The Prime Minister and his colleagues in the Cabinet are aware of this. All that is needed now is a strong political will. Just do it Dr. Singh
 

sasidhar

New member
Hi....I guess you need to look at the viewpoint of Leftists as they are opposing the FDI to get a complete picture.
 

duadisha

New member
hi...thanks a lot for the projects on retail....they are really good

i am looking for soe ter papers on International finance...plz let me know if there is any on this site...or if smone of you has it plz post it on the site...

also i m making a major research project on scheduled commercial banks in india...if anyone can give me some matter on it...it will be really helpful
 

something

New member
Hi there!
here's an interesting look at FDI and TNCs by Michael Parenti


Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World
By Michael Parenti

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.

The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.

U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.

The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.

A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries.

Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.

The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.

But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.

They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.

So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings---which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.

Here then we have explained a “mystery.” It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don’t adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.

In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?

No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?

The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.

In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.

The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!

Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.
 

sharma

New member
Hi there!

provide projects for subject in Finance for MBA as i want to submit the project in the college and please guide and help me for projects
 
project on FDI in rajasthan.. :tea:

Hey piya, i checked your presentation and it was really awesome and is going to help many people. Well, i have also got a document related to FDI in rajasthan and would like to share it with you so that more and more people can get good content and help from your thread.
 

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