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India's balance of payments (BoP) has gone though several merits and oddities over its long journey since her liberalization era. On its way forward it has faced three of the world's worst challenges from the global turmoil. Of them, the impact of first crisis on India was minimal. But the other two crises had a tremendous impact on its external sector. In effect, the current and capital account of India's BoP have undergone significant structural changes during these two and a half a decades (1990–1991 to 2014–2015). It is in this context this chapter evaluates the evolution of two and a half decades of India's BoP in the context of global changes and exchange rate fluctuations and instability.

One of the highly debatable issues in the arena of international economics in recent years is whether a country should go for full capital account convertibility. In terms of the timing and process of capital account liberalization, India and China have been remarkably similar. Both started with a more or less closed capital account in the 1970s and the 1980s, in the context of a heavily state-influenced, planned economy. And in both countries, the first wave of liberalization came in the early 1990s and thus, the journey began. The objective of this chapter is to provide a critical analysis of both India and China's approach to the capital account liberalization program in the backdrop of the recent financial crises and to give an account of the theoretical issues that have arisen in international discussions on CAC and India's standpoint on this issue in particular. Second, how far is the capital account liberalization justified in the context of the recent episodes of financial crises that India and China have witnessed? Using a macroempiric model, this chapter tries to answer whether every member country in the IMF should hurriedly go for CAC or not. In addition, empirically through FMOLS, the authors pool in the “Rupee Convertibility” and “Renminbi Internationalization” along with exchange rate variation and its implications for India's and China's BoP situation (in terms of the export–import position and FDI flows) based on data from 1992 to 2017. ^{1 , 2}

Feminist contributions to debates on gender, poverty, and social justice have deepened our understanding of the ways gender as a structuring principle of social life and an embedded hierarchy of values produces different concepts and experience of poverty as well as adds new meaning to the idea of “human flourishing.” Gender inequality remains a major barrier to human development; the disadvantages facing women and girls are a major source of inequality; since women and girls are discriminated against in health, education, political representation, and labor market, which has negative repercussions for development of their capabilities and their freedom of choice, remaining far away from social justice (Nussbaum, 1995). Recent statistics show just how far societies are from achieving gender equality. In the above backdrop, the chapter focuses on the position and status of women in India in the realm of gender equality, poverty reduction, and social justice as well as the public actions viewed from India's perspectives. At the same time it highlights the importance of global actions in an endeavor to establish gender equality, breaking the chain of poverty trap and establishing social justice along with their fallouts in the subsequent years.

The ups and downs of the stock markets are consistently in the news. All things considered, there's no end to reporting the trajectory of volatility. Wide value changes in stock prices are a daily event in any stock market as speculators respond to monetary, business, and political situations. The main question is − did the Indian stock market develop a speculative bubble during the time of the US subprime crisis? Also, in terms of knowledge gained for an investor or a policy maker, we ask the following question: As to what extent are speculative bubbles predictable during a financial crisis? Knowledge gained by investors is also a part and parcel of an applied knowledge economy in a broader dimension.

In this chapter, the authors use a speculative bubble tracker, based on a Wiener stochastic process, to check for the existence of speculative bubbles during the 2008–2009 US subprime crisis. The data used in the study are daily SENSEX values (i.e., combination of stock prices of 30 well-established, most actively traded stocks of financially sound companies listed in the Bombay Stock Exchange) for the period between December 2007 and December 2009. Using such forms of daily data, the authors trace out the price movements using a Brownian motion equation and hence, try to correlate the stock price fluctuations with fluctuations in the crisis index (as put together by the authors) in the Indian context. Interestingly, for India, such a speculative bubble was prevalent during the time period considered pertaining to the 2008 US subprime crisis.

Summing up, the implication in terms of knowledge gained is particularly of interest for the portfolio managers who are engaged in devising diversification strategies for their portfolios.

Financial instability and economic crises are closely intertwined. There is no universally accepted definition. The term ‘stability’ or ‘instability’ refers to the behaviour of the system rather than to individual institutions. However, one cannot rule out that failure of a single financial institution can trigger significant financial turmoil as was happened in 2007–08 global financial crises. Like unstable equilibrium, instability implies inability to correct itself on its own. Instability, if it persists, turns into a crisis. In the above backdrop, the objective of this chapter is to investigate the financial crises and instability viewed both from economic and international political economy perspectives with a tale of four generation crisis models as it has been evolved over time to explain the phenomenon of different types of crises.

Terrorism has been practiced for centuries in different countries throughout the globe. The international struggle against terrorism started in the early part of the last century, and in 1937, the League of Nations concluded a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism. It is now well established in customary international law that since piracy, slavery, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are so terrible and affect the peace, tranquility, and security of all States, any State has the right to try persons for these crimes, irrespective of their nationality or where the crime was committed. This is known as universal jurisdiction. Terrorism is not quite in that category, one reason being the lack of international agreement on a comprehensive definition of terrorism. Instead, universal treaties adopted by the United Nations (UN) specializes agencies and, more recently Chapter VII measures of the UN Secretary Council, have been the means by which international law contributes to the struggle against terrorism. This aspect is discussed in a Section. Besides, today, the impact of terrorism in maintaining law and order, in assuring peace and tranquility to law-abiding citizenry and in harnessing growth and development, both at the national and international level, is quite grave, gloomy, and alarming. Global terrorism has, in fact, become an unprecedented challenge to the human civilization itself. The present chapter tries to examine the nature of terrorism at the global level with special reference to India and proposes for formation of international laws and co-ordinations to combat it.

The present century is an age of knowledge-based economy. Higher education is in the process of transformation and thereby challenging the traditional system of education in India. The present paper reviews the current conditions of ICT use by the students in higher education in India. The major objectives of the study are (1) assessment of the use of computer and Internet by the students of higher education in India and (2) to find the determinants of use of ICT by the students in India. The study uses the NSSO 71st Round Unit Level Data on Social Consumption: Education Survey (71st Round, 2014). The present paper is based on 6,035 students from all the regions in India out of which 3,127 students were from the rural area and 2,908 from the urban area. The findings from logit analysis suggest that the determinants of ICT use by the students in higher education in India are regional disparities, gender, education levels of households, type of courses pursued by the students, type of institutions, access to computer and Internet facility, consumption levels of households, and students' residence type.

The catch word “Globalization” has been defended by advocates for lifting people out of poverty and the inequality in the world. But it has been criticized by opponents for failing to solve the problem of poverty, inequality, and for increasingly creating wealth disparity. This raises the question. The fact is that the contemporary world exhibits very high levels of inequality of income and wealth both between countries and within countries. Wealth inequality is more pronounced than that of income inequality across the globe and within-countries. Evidence suggests that rising inequality and wealth disparity arising out of globalization drive is choking off the potential benefits to the poor. In this backdrop, a composite assessment has been made in the present chapter to answer the question “whether globalization with its particular ideology, the market fundamentalism has benefited many and whether the performance on the distributional front has really been impressive.” From facts and evidence, the study finds that inequalities in income and wealth, also in wages have widened in many developed, developing developed, and developing countries. Technological change and globalization are their main sources.

Of late, the ongoing trade war between the two most powerful economies of the world – United States and China – has placed both the countries on a horrid front, breaking the world’s most important bilateral relationship of the twenty-first century. Their failure to reach a concrete agreement on mutual benefit on matters related to growing hefty amount of China’s current account surplus of balance of payments (BoP) and endangering United States to create jobs on its side, China’s use of illegal and unfair methods to acquire rights on intellectual property and US technology at an effectively discounted price; and also the concern that China by hook or by crook seeks to weaken the US economy has made matters worse. It is in this context the chapter analyzes the trade tensions between them and the context under which it came to the fore and with what outcomes. The analysis recommends interventions of the global leaders to mitigate the issues for the betterment of the world economy.