Which countries on 8 July 2016 signed four agreements to give new impetus to bilateral co-operation between the two nations? ?->(Show Answer!)

1. Which countries on 8 July 2016 signed four agreements to give new impetus to bilateral co-operation between the two nations?

Answer: India and South Africa.

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MCQ-> DIRECTIONS for questions 24 to 50: Each of the five passages given below is followed by questions. For each question, choose the best answer.The World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created in the early 1990s as a component of the Uruguay Round negotiation. However, it could have been negotiated as part of the Tokyo Round of the 1970s, since that negotiation was an attempt at a 'constitutional reform' of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Or it could have been put off to the future, as the US government wanted. What factors led to the creation of the WTO in the early 1990s?One factor was the pattern of multilateral bargaining that developed late in the Uruguay Round. Like all complex international agreements, the WTO was a product of a series of trade-offs between principal actors and groups. For the United States, which did not want a new Organisation, the dispute settlement part of the WTO package achieved its longstanding goal of a more effective and more legal dispute settlement system. For the Europeans, who by the 1990s had come to view GATT dispute settlement less in political terms and more as a regime of legal obligations, the WTO package was acceptable as a means to discipline the resort to unilateral measures by the United States. Countries like Canada and other middle and smaller trading partners were attracted by the expansion of a rules-based system and by the symbolic value of a trade Organisation, both of which inherently support the weak against the strong. The developing countries were attracted due to the provisions banning unilateral measures. Finally, and perhaps most important, many countries at the Uruguay Round came to put a higher priority on the export gains than on the import losses that the negotiation would produce, and they came to associate the WTO and a rules-based system with those gains. This reasoning - replicated in many countries - was contained in U.S. Ambassador Kantor's defence of the WTO, and it amounted to a recognition that international trade and its benefits cannot be enjoyed unless trading nations accept the discipline of a negotiated rules-based environment.A second factor in the creation of the WTO was pressure from lawyers and the legal process. The dispute settlement system of the WTO was seen as a victory of legalists over pragmatists but the matter went deeper than that. The GATT, and the WTO, are contract organisations based on rules, and it is inevitable that an Organisation created to further rules will in turn be influenced by the legal process. Robert Hudec has written of the 'momentum of legal development', but what is this precisely? Legal development can be defined as promotion of the technical legal values of consistency, clarity (or, certainty) and effectiveness; these are values that those responsible for administering any legal system will seek to maximise. As it played out in the WTO, consistency meant integrating under one roof the whole lot of separate agreements signed under GATT auspices; clarity meant removing ambiguities about the powers of contracting parties to make certain decisions or to undertake waivers; and effectiveness meant eliminating exceptions arising out of grandfather-rights and resolving defects in dispute settlement procedures and institutional provisions. Concern for these values is inherent in any rules-based system of co-operation, since without these values rules would be meaningless in the first place. Rules, therefore, create their own incentive for fulfilment.The momentum of legal development has occurred in other institutions besides the GATT, most notably in the European Union (EU). Over the past two decades the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has consistently rendered decisions that have expanded incrementally the EU's internal market, in which the doctrine of 'mutual recognition' handed down in the case Cassis de Dijon in 1979 was a key turning point. The Court is now widely recognised as a major player in European integration, even though arguably such a strong role was not originally envisaged in the Treaty of Rome, which initiated the current European Union. One means the Court used to expand integration was the 'teleological method of interpretation', whereby the actions of member states were evaluated against 'the accomplishment of the most elementary community goals set forth in the Preamble to the [Rome] treaty'. The teleological method represents an effort to keep current policies consistent with stated goals, and it is analogous to the effort in GATT to keep contracting party trade practices consistent with stated rules. In both cases legal concerns and procedures are an independent force for further cooperation.In large part the WTO was an exercise in consolidation. In the context of a trade negotiation that created a near- revolutionary expansion of international trade rules, the formation of the WTO was a deeply conservative act needed to ensure that the benefits of the new rules would not be lost. The WTO was all about institutional structure and dispute settlement: these are the concerns of conservatives and not revolutionaries, which is why lawyers and legalists took the lead on these issues. The WTO codified the GATT institutional practice that had developed by custom over three decades, and it incorporated a new dispute settlement system that was necessary to keep both old and new rules from becoming a sham. Both the international structure and the dispute settlement system were necessary to preserve and enhance the integrity of the multilateral trade regime that had been built incrementally from the 1940s to the 1990s.What could be the closest reason why the WTO was not formed in the 1970s?
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MCQ-> Read the following passages carefully and answer the questions given at the end of each passage.PASSAGE 3Typically women participate in the labour force at a very high rate in poor rural countries. The participation rate then falls as countries industrialise and move into the middle income class. Finally, if the country grows richer still, more families have the resources for higher education for women and from there they often enter the labour force in large numbers. Usually, economic growth goes hand in hand with emancipation of women. Among rich countries according to a 2015 study, female labour force participation ranges from nearly 80 percent in Switzerland to 70 percent in Germany and less than 60 Percent in the United States and Japan. Only 68 Percent of Canadian omen participated in the workforce in 1990; two decades later that increased to 74 Percent largely due to reforms including tax cuts for second earners and new childcare services. In Netherlands the female labour participation rate doubled since 1980 to 74 Percent as a result of expanded parental leave policies and the spread of flexible, part time working arrangements. In a 2014 survey of 143 emerging countries, the World Bank found that 90 Percent have at least one law that limits the economic opportunities available to women. These laws include bans or limitations on women owning property, opening a bank account, signing a contract, entering a courtroom, travelling alone, driving or controlling family finances. Such restrictions are particularly prevalent in the Middle East and South Asia with the world’s lowest female labour force participation, 26 and 35 percent respectively. According to date available with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), between 2004 and 2011, when the Indian economy grew at a healthy average of about 7 percent, there was a decline in female participation in the country’s labour force from over 35 percent to 25 percent. India also posted the lowest rate of female participation in the workforce among BRIC countries. India’s performance in female workforce participation stood at 27 percent, significantly behind China (64 percent), Brazil (59 percent), Russian Federation (57 percent), and South Africa (45 percent). The number of working women in India had climbed between 2000 and 2005, increasing from 34 percent to 37 percent, but since then the rate of women in the workforce has to fallen to 27 percent as of 2014, said the report citing data from the World Bank. The gap between male and female workforce participation in urban areas in 2011 stood at 40 percent, compared to rural areas where the gap was about 30 percent. However, in certain sectors like financial services, Indian women lead the charge. While only one in 10 Indian companies are led by women, more than half of them are in the financial sector. Today, women head both the top public and private banks in India. Another example is India’s aviation sector, 11.7 percent of India’s 5,100 pilots are women, versus 3 percent worldwide. But these successes only represent a small of women in the country. India does poorly in comparison to its neighbours despite a more robust economic growth. In comparison to India, women in Bangladesh have increased their participation in the labour market, which is due to the growth of the ready- made garment sector and a push to rural female employment. In 2015, women comprised of 43 percent of the labour force in Bangladesh. The rate has also increased in Pakistan, albeit from a very low starting point, while participation has remained relatively stable in Sri Lanka. Myanmar with 79 percent and Malaysia with 49 percent are also way ahead of India. Lack of access to higher education, fewer job opportunities, the lack of flexibility in working conditions, as well as domestic duties are cited as factors behind the low rates. Marriage significantly reduced the probability of women working by about 8 percent in rural areas and more than twice as much in urban areas, said an Assocham report. ILO attributes this to three factors: increasing educational enrolment, improvement in earning of male workers that discourage women’s economic participation, and lack of employment opportunities at certain levels of skills and qualifications discouraging women to seek work. The hurdles to working women often involve a combination of written laws and cultural norms. Cultures don’t change overnight but laws can. The IMF says that even a small step such as countries granting women the right to open a bank account can lead to substantial increase in female labour force participation over the next seven years. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), even a 10 percent increase in women participating in the workforce can boost gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.3 percent. The OECD recently estimated that eliminating the gender gap would lead to an overall increase in GDP of 12 percent in its member nations between 2015 and 2030. The GDP gains would peak close to 20 percent in both Japan and South Korea and more than 20 percent in Italy. A similar analysis by Booz and Company showed that closing gender gap in emerging countries could yield even larger gains in GDP by 2020, ranging from a 34 percent gain in Egypt to 27 percent in India and 9 percent in Brazil. According to the above passage, though there are many reasons for low female labour force participation, the most important focus of the passage is on
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MCQ-> The first table gives the number of saris (of all the eight colours) stocked in six regional showrooms. The second gives the number of saris (of all the eight colours) sold in these six regional showrooms. The third table gives the percentage of saris sold to saris stocked for each colour in each region. The fourth table gives the percentage of saris of a specific colour sold within that region. The fifth table gives the percentage of saris of a specific colour sold across all the regions. Study the tables and for each of the following questions, choose the best alternative.Table 1

Which region-colour combination accounts for the highest percentage of sales to stock?
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MCQ-> Before the internet, one of the most rapid changes to the global economy and trade was wrought by something so blatantly useful that it is hard to imagine a struggle to get it adopted: the shipping container. In the early 1960s, before the standard container became ubiquitous, freight costs were I0 per cent of the value of US imports, about the same barrier to trade as the average official government import tariff. Yet in a journey that went halfway round the world, half of those costs could be incurred in two ten-mile movements through the ports at either end. The predominant ‘break-bulk’ method, where each shipment was individually split up into loads that could be handled by a team of dockers, was vastly complex and labour-intensive. Ships could take weeks or months to load, as a huge variety of cargoes of different weights, shapes and sizes had to be stacked together by hand. Indeed, one of the most unreliable aspects of such a labour-intensive process was the labour. Ports, like mines, were frequently seething pits of industrial unrest. Irregular work on one side combined with what was often a tight-knit, well - organized labour community on the other.In 1956, loading break-bulk cargo cost $5.83 per ton. The entrepreneurial genius who saw the possibilities for standardized container shipping, Malcolm McLean, floated his first containerized ship in that year and claimed to be able to shift cargo for 15.8 cents a ton. Boxes of the same size that could be loaded by crane and neatly stacked were much faster to load. Moreover, carrying cargo in a standard container would allow it to be shifted between truck, train and ship without having to be repacked each time.But between McLean’s container and the standardization of the global market were an array of formidable obstacles. They began at home in the US with the official Interstate Commerce Commission, which could prevent price competition by setting rates for freight haulage by route and commodity, and the powerful International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) labour union. More broadly, the biggest hurdle was achieving what economists call ‘network effects’: the benefit of a standard technology rises exponentially as more people use it. To dominate world trade, containers had to be easily interchangeable between different shipping lines, ports, trucks and railcars. And to maximize efficiency, they all needed to be the same size. The adoption of a network technology often involves overcoming the resistance of those who are heavily invested in the old system. And while the efficiency gains are clear to see, there are very obvious losers as well as winners. For containerization, perhaps the most spectacular example was the demise of New York City as a port.In the early I950s, New York handled a third of US seaborne trade in manufactured goods. But it was woefully inefficient, even with existing break-bulk technology: 283 piers, 98 of which were able to handle ocean-going ships, jutted out into the river from Brooklyn and Manhattan. Trucks bound‘ for the docks had to fiive through the crowded, narrow streets of Manhattan, wait for an hour or two before even entering a pier, and then undergo a laborious two-stage process in which the goods foot were fithr unloaded into a transit shed and then loaded onto a ship. ‘Public loader’ work gangs held exclusive rights to load and unload on a particular pier, a power in effect granted by the ILA, which enforced its monopoly with sabotage and violence against than competitors. The ILA fought ferociously against containerization, correctly foreseeing that it would destroy their privileged position as bandits controlling the mountain pass. On this occasion, bypassing them simply involved going across the river. A container port was built in New Jersey, where a 1500-foot wharf allowed ships to dock parallel to shore and containers to be lified on and off by crane. Between 1963 - 4 and 1975 - 6, the number of days worked by longshoremen in Manhattan went from 1.4 million to 127,041.Containers rapidly captured the transatlantic market, and then the growing trade with Asia. The effect of containerization is hard to see immediately in freight rates, since the oil price hikes of the 1970s kept them high, but the speed with which shippers adopted; containerization made it clear it brought big benefits of efficiency and cost. The extraordinary growth of the Asian tiger economies of Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong, which based their development strategy on exports, was greatly helped by the container trade that quickly built up between the US and east Asia. Ocean-borne exports from South Korea were 2.9 million tons in 1969 and 6 million in 1973, and its exports to the US tripled.But the new technology did not get adopted all on its own. It needed a couple of pushes from government - both, as it happens, largely to do with the military. As far as the ships were concerned, the same link between the merchant and military navy that had inspired the Navigation Acts in seventeenth-century England endured into twentieth-century America. The government's first helping hand was to give a spur to the system by adopting it to transport military cargo. The US armed forces, seeing the efficiency of the system, started contracting McLean’s company Pan-Atlantic, later renamed Sea-land, to carry equipment to the quarter of a million American soldiers stationed in Western Europe. One of the few benefits of America's misadventure in Vietnam was a rapid expansion of containerization. Because war involves massive movements of men and material, it is often armies that pioneer new techniques in supply chains.The government’s other role was in banging heads together sufficiently to get all companies to accept the same size container. Standard sizes were essential to deliver the economies of scale that came from interchangeability - which, as far as the military was concerned, was vital if the ships had to be commandeered in case war broke out. This was a significant problem to overcome, not least because all the companies that had started using the container had settled on different sizes. Pan- Atlantic used 35- foot containers, because that was the maximum size allowed on the highways in its home base in New Jersey. Another of the big shipping companies, Matson Navigation, used a 24-foot container since its biggest trade was in canned pineapple from Hawaii, and a container bigger than that would have been too heavy for a crane to lift. Grace Line, which largely traded with Latin America, used a foot container that was easier to truck around winding mountain roads.Establishing a US standard and then getting it adopted internationally took more than a decade. Indeed, not only did the US Maritime Administration have to mediate in these rivalries but also to fight its own turf battles with the American Standards Association, an agency set up by the private sector. The matter was settled by using the power of federal money: the Federal Maritime Board (FMB), which handed out to public subsidies for shipbuilding, decreed that only the 8 x 8-foot containers in the lengths of l0, 20, 30 or 40 feet would be eligible for handouts.Identify the correct statement:
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