Indian Economy GK Questions with Answers – Page 46

The committee headed by S. S. Tarapore reported in 1997 and again in 2006 and set out a phased road map for making the rupee convertible on the capital account, together with the preconditions to be met first, such as fiscal discipline, low and stable inflation and a strong banking…

When the rupee depreciates, each dollar buys more rupees, so an Indian good priced in rupees costs a foreign buyer fewer dollars and exports become more competitive, while every imported item costs more rupees than before.

Since the unification of the exchange rate in March 1993 the value of the rupee has been determined by demand and supply in the foreign exchange market, while the Reserve Bank intervenes by buying or selling dollars to curb sharp volatility rather than to defend any particular level.

Small savings such as deposits in post office schemes are domestic rupee liabilities of the government and have nothing to do with the country's external assets.

India accepted the obligations of Article VIII of the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund in August 1994, which means the rupee can be exchanged freely for trade in goods and services, travel, education, remittances and interest payments.

FERA treated foreign exchange as a scarce resource, forbade most dealings unless permitted and made breaches criminal offences.

Foreign investors bring in foreign exchange and look for predictable rules, and the difficulty most often listed for India is regulatory uncertainty: changing rules, clearances spread across departments and states, and disputes that take long to settle.

Statement 1 is right because when the United States Federal Reserve tightens, returns there become attractive and portfolio money flows out of emerging markets, which is capital flight.

Statement 1 is right because the NEER is a trade weighted index of the rupee against a basket of partner currencies, so a rise in the index means the rupee has appreciated in nominal terms.

By the middle of 1991 India's foreign exchange reserves had fallen to roughly a fortnight of imports, gold was pledged abroad to raise funds, the country borrowed from the International Monetary Fund and the rupee was devalued in two steps in July.

The capital account records transactions that change the ownership of assets and liabilities between residents and non-residents, and foreign direct investment, along with portfolio investment, external commercial borrowings and deposits of non-resident Indians, falls squarely in that group.

The DGFT works under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and under the Foreign Trade (Development and Regulation) Act of 1992 it frames and administers the Foreign Trade Policy, issues the importer-exporter code without which no one may trade across the border, and runs the export promotion schemes.

GATT was signed in 1947 as a provisional agreement on tariff reduction, and after the Uruguay Round it was replaced on 1 January 1995 by the World Trade Organization, a permanent body with headquarters at Geneva and a binding dispute settlement system.

In August 1994 India accepted the obligations of Article VIII of the International Monetary Fund and made the rupee fully convertible on the current account, so that foreign exchange for trade, travel, education and remittances could be obtained freely at the market rate.

The balance of trade, also called the merchandise or visible balance, is the difference between the value of goods exported and goods imported; nothing else enters it.

Self-reliance, the goal set out in India's early plans, means building the capacity to produce at home what the country would otherwise have to buy abroad, so the true indicator is that imports of such goods are avoided.

An inward-looking trade strategy, better known as import substitution, was the policy India followed from the Second Five Year Plan until 1991, and it rested on two instruments.

Export security is not a recognised category of trade barrier; it is not a device that restricts the movement of goods across a border.

The balance of payments is the statement that records every economic transaction between the residents of a country and the rest of the world in a given period, which is precisely what the external sector of an economy means; it covers merchandise trade, services, income, transfers and capital flows.

Asia takes the largest share of India’s exports, close to half of the total, far ahead of any other continent.