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Thursday, April 28, 2016

The Argumentative Indian: Insights on Free Trade from top B.Com Colleges in Greater Noida

Top B.Com colleges in Greater Noida encourage academicians to engage in freewheeling intellectual debates and deliberations on free trade and globalization. This is to assert that the study of economics papers like business economics and business environment in the domain of undergraduate degree programs in commerce assumes a place of pride and great importance. To streamline the track mentioned above it is important to note that a discipline like business environment requires surgical precision in the usage of mathematical economics to inject the much required positive element in the study of social sciences along with the fusion of philosophical foundations of economics, economic history and trade theory to cater to the requirements of normative approach. The statement might appear subversive if not paradoxical that many top B.Com colleges while dealing with a paper like business environment tend to under-emphasise the scope and importance of trade theory and the related debate on issues of free trade and globalization. At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, academicians make a deliberate intellectual endeavour to engineer a scientific approach to the track (based on mathematical modelling) while trying to retain the human element of a non-lab based science like economics. Our perspective on free trade is premised on the works of noted trade and development theorist like Jagdish Bhagwati, Paul Krugman, Arvind Panagariya, Joseph Stiglitz, Debraj Ray, Pranab Bardhan, Kaushik Basu and the late Harry Gordon Johnson.

Advocating Macaulay’s Vision of Trade as an Engine of Growth

Given that we live in times of when a uni-polar world order is misconstrued as a flat world, it makes enormous good sense to assert that trade has indeed acted as an engine of growth. The point though is to scratch deeper to get beneath the pseudo-intellectual passions running high on the animal spirit of capitalism and question the exact classification of winners and losers in this definition of international trade. Economists like Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya and others have exhibited empirical evidence based approaches to substantiating claims about trade led economic growth. To a great extent it is only humble for us lesser mortals to wholeheartedly accept their doctrines based on the economic growth rates that the Asian Tigers, China and India have achieved by engineering an economic system design whereby trade policy acts as a gateway to gains from exchange and gains from specialization The Flying Geese model of trade liberalization also adds fuel to the fire of this raging advocacy of free trade and the enormous potential that it has to address issues of world poverty, unemployment and low per capita incomes. The Cambridge version of Edward Denison also greatly steers the pro-free trade lobby to the shores of safety while amply exhibiting evidence amounting to the runaway success of softer economic borders.

Advocating Social Market Democracy for Economic Development

The social market democracy advocated by the likes of Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz and the rest have in their discourses on trade theory fashioned a strong critique of free trade and the over the top usage of neo-classical policy making that is now renowned as the “Washington Consensus”. In fact they have also produced mounting evidence to the contrary that free trade twinned with colonialism has led to free massacre of indigenous peoples across communities in the Third World. They have with documentary evidences substantiated the cost of overly relying on mathematical and statistical modelling for the purpose of policy formulation and decision making while taking the liberty of omitting human spirits of development and gross national happiness. Yet it is fashionable to suggest that howsoever intellectually stimulating this side may seem, none of these economists have spent too much time in India for teaching, research, voluntary pro-bono social causes or any kind of campaigning to take poverty heads on. It is equally true for the former lobby of economists as well.

Is Free Trade the Same as Fair Trade?

To take the debate on free trade and globalization to its due climax, it is worthwhile to ask for the legitimacy of free trade and its capacity to resolve rather than create challenges for the Third World. This is to suggest that the Third World is where more than 60% of the global population resides. To quote the legendary Massachusetts economist Paul Samuelson, we are dealing with “the importance of being unimportant.” The lion’s share of humanity resides in the third world and thus going by the concept of universal adult franchise and intellectual democracy, the votes of the impoverished, overpopulated and plagued peoples matter more if not as much as the votes of the First World. Economic history on a global scale offers compelling evidence on the North-South Divide, the centre- periphery argument and the infant industry argument of Friedrich List. It is not enough to have a borderless world. It is also important to respect borders and sovereignty of nations.

At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, one of the top B.Com Colleges in Greater Noida, the academicians of the faculty of business administration and commerce engage in active research on the tracks of free trade, infant industry argument and poverty in search of solutions to real life challenges with the hope that we can offer academic and intellectual inputs for profits, people and the planet. We also acknowledge the efforts of our B.Com students Himanshu Sharma, Aril Wadia, Anu Sharma and Saumya Shukla in collaborating with academicians to step up academic efforts in the study on free trade.