D.Murali

Chennai: The zone concept is so powerful that the idea of free zones is widely prevalent, observe V.K. Srinivasan and P.S. Sundaram in ‘Special Economic Zones’ (www.mediaindia.org). “While the old free zone was often described as a static, labour intensive, incentive-driven, exploitative enclave, the new zone paradigm is a dynamic, investment-intensive, management-driven, enabling, and integrated economic development tool,” the authors add.For India, which launched its first EPZ in 1965, and followed it with another in the 1970s, and a few more in the 1980s, global experience became relevant only in the 1990s, says the book. For, that was when “liberalisation of country’s trade and fiscal policies required to be harmonised with global trends, without sacrificing the values and goals of equitable development of regions with different levels of resource endowment.”SEZs have a relevance to India if applied with due diligence as to the specific requirements of industrial production and services designed to reach export markets, the authors reason. They argue that the crucial question, however, is whether the Ministry of Commerce should adopt an incremental approach to the number of SEZs, their state-wise and sectoral distribution, or proceed with the current approach of en masse approval. There is, therefore, need and scope for change in the implementation process with introduction of techno-economic appraisal and environmental impact studies of the project before the SEZ proposals are cleared, urge Srinivasan and Sundaram.Important read.**

VAT commentary

All searches are inspections, but all inspections are not search. A thought, that is, you may like to reflect on, at length, but this is just one of the many hundreds of distilled judicial nuggets of wisdom captured by Ravi Subramanyam in ‘Commentary on Tamil Nadu VAT Act, 2006 and Central Sales Tax Act, 1956’ (www.cliofindia.com). Another such nugget is about why it is necessary for authorities to consider the cumulative effect of documents: “They should not take out a single document and find out some technical defects here and there without taking into consideration that other accompanying documents sufficiently cover those defects and disclose the real state of things.” That seizure under the Act cannot automatically become a seizure by police, reads a tribunal ruling digested in the book. “There must be a separate order of seizure by the police or from the competent Criminal Court…”For the practising professionals’ shelf.**

Grey areas in world trade

Although the industrial tariff level has significantly declined since 1995, the misuse of AD (anti-dumping) provision has lowered the extent of realised market access, bemoan Debashis Chakraborty and Amir Ullah Khan in ‘The WTO Deadlocked: Understanding the dynamics of international trade’ (www.sagepublications.com). Over the last decade, AD actions have evolved as a major trade-distorting mechanism, benefiting the domestic industries of the initiator, they add. Talking of ‘the grey areas involved in calculation of dumping,’ the authors mention the average pricing principle, which compares the weighted average of ‘normal values’ with weighted average prices for all comparable export transactions, or the home market prices and export prices on a transaction to transaction basis. The rule is, however, not followed in a number of cases, rue Chakraborty and Khan. “The agreement allows countries to deviate from this rule when export prices differ considerably among purchasers, regions or periods. In such instances, a weighted average home consumption price may be compared with an individual export transaction. This kind of comparison is often manipulated to suit the imposition of ADD (anti-dumping duty)…” Useful exposition.**http://BookPeek.blogspot.com