Suchergebnisse

The tourism sector is experiencing numerous challenges as a result of the global economic crisis. After a significant contraction in 2009, tourism rebounded strongly in 2010 and in 2011 the international tourist arrivals and receipts are projected to increase substantially. The Tourism industry is expected to show a sustained recovery in 2012. The crisis has a particularly strong impact and slightly negative consequences in Bangladesh. The country is undergoing a political crisis, as well, and it seems that the forthcoming elections may be the only solution for the restoration of stability and social peace. In addition, tourism can be the driving force behind Bangladesh economic recovery. However, for its achievement, the country's policymakers should take several measures towards restructuring and improve the sector. These measures include enhancement of alternative forms of tourism; environmental protection; creation of quality infrastructure; and a boost of competitiveness through a tourism product that offers value for money.

The tourism sector is experiencing numerous challenges as a result of the global economic crisis. After a significant contraction in 2009, tourism rebounded strongly in 2010 and in 2011 the international tourist arrivals and receipts are projected to increase substantially. The Tourism industry is expected to show a sustained recovery in 2012. The crisis has a particularly strong impact and slightly negative consequences in Bangladesh. The country is undergoing a political crisis, as well, and it seems that the forthcoming elections may be the only solution for the restoration of stability and social peace. In addition, tourism can be the driving force behind Bangladesh economic recovery. However, for its achievement, the country's policymakers should take several measures towards restructuring and improve the sector. These measures include enhancement of alternative forms of tourism; environmental protection; creation of quality infrastructure; and a boost of competitiveness through a tourism product that offers value for money.

The tourism sector is experiencing numerous challenges as a result of the global economic crisis. After a significant contraction in 2009, tourism rebounded strongly in 2010 and in 2011 the international tourist arrivals and receipts are projected to increase substantially. The Tourism industry is expected to show a sustained recovery in 2012. The crisis has a particularly strong impact and slightly negative consequences in Bangladesh. The country is undergoing a political crisis, as well, and it seems that the forthcoming elections may be the only solution for the restoration of stability and social peace. In addition, tourism can be the driving force behind Bangladesh economic recovery. However, for its achievement, the country's policymakers should take several measures towards restructuring and improve the sector. These measures include enhancement of alternative forms of tourism; environmental protection; creation of quality infrastructure; and a boost of competitiveness through a tourism product that offers value for money.

The modern world characteristically stands divided into
developed and developing countries, or into core and peripheral
societies, which exist at different stages of development but in general
comprise a single global economy. The former dominate the latter in a
typical division of labour in which the economically rich countries of
the core areas specialise in the manufacture of industrial goods of high
technology, whereas the developing countries where the majority of
population depends on agriculture as livelihood specialise in the
production of mainly agricultural raw materials. Some semi-peripheral
countries mediate between these two categories in a complex web of
socio-economic relations, structures, and formations. [Wallerstein
(1979; 1984)]. Therefore, the economic problems of particular societies,
regions, and countries are now closely connected and even inextricably
intertwined. Developing countries like Pakistan have now been integrated
into this global economy.

Before her death in 1992, Professor Krishna Bharadwaj had
reached the prime of her intellectual growth so that her mature thought
on classical political economy and her ideas on development paradigms
had begun to coalesce into a single whole. As the title of the book
under review implies, this work of the late Indian economist comprises a
study of the general problems of economic growth, accumulation,
exchange, distribution, and development based on the theory of surplus,
including its generation, appropriation, and distribution in society.
The author applies classical theory to the complex development process
in the developing economies, and to the specific problems of the Indian
economy in the industrial, agricultural, and commercial
sectors.

The present socio-cconomic fomlation in the urban, rural and
tribal areas of Pakistan is in transition from its semi-feudal phase to
an urbanised and industrialised economy and society. In this
trdnsformation to an industrialised market economy, industrial capital
and the new classes of entrepreneurs, financiers. industrialists.
businessmen and wage-labourers play crucial roles in the overall
production process. ' However, in the rural and tribal areas of Pakistan
the old feudal classes still dominate and tenaciously cling to
pre-

India, with 800 million people, vast land resources,
heterogeneous linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic groups and
caste and class divisions, faces complex and formidable social,
economic, and political problems. After experimenting with a mixed and
controlled, 'socialist' economy for four decades since 1947, in which
the public sector played a predominant role, a new strategy of
liberalisation and deregulation is being formulated with the aim of
integrating Indian economy with the world market. This implies a
framework of a liberal market economy with less control and more
freedoms. The book under review is the outcome of a large
interdisciplinary research project initiated in 1986 and completed in
1990 by Indian and foreign scholars. Divided into the two main sections
of politics and economics, the book comprises ten independent but
interlinked essays/chapters which discuss some of the longterm
socio-economic problems facing India. The recent policy of
liberalisation, it is important to note, reflects the urgency and
relevance of some of the theses presented in this important book. The
removal of unnecessary internal controls, greater stress on the private
sector, curtailment of wasteful expenditures, depreciation of the Indian
rupee and its freefloating against foreign currencies, and other
economic reforms recommended are intended to enhance the comparative
advantage of the Indian economy and to make it more competitive in the
world market.

Islamic economics emerged as a discipline separate from the
general science of economics in the wake of the political process of
Islamisation of the Pakistani society and economy during 1977-88. In
formulating its fundamental principles, Islamic economics seeks to fuse
Islamic religion with economic science; that is, it tries to combine the
study of economic phenomenon of ordinary business of life with religious
beliefs, ethical norms, moral ideals, rules and laws, thus putatively
believing that the social science of economics is a secular discipline
which does not concern itself with value judgements, and that Islamic
economics is a plausible alternative to modern economics since it is
based on the values, norms and principles of Islam. [Ahmed (1981), p.
xiv; Chapra (1985), pp.19-29).]

Modem economic factors and forces are rapidly transforming the
world into a single society and economy in which the migration of people
at the national and international levels plays an important role.
Pakistan, as a modem nation, has characteristically been deeply
influenced by such migrations, both national and international. The
first great exodus occurred in 1947 when over eight million Indian
Muslims migrated from different parts of India to Pakistan. Thus, from
the very beginning mass population movements and migrations have been
woven into Pakistan's social fabric through its history, culture and
religion. These migrations have greatly influenced the form and
substance of the national economy, the contours of the political system,
patterns of urbanisation and the physiognomy of the overall culture and
history of the country. The recent political divide of Sindh on
rural/Sindhi, and urban/non-Sindhi, ethnic and linguistic lines is the
direct result of these earlier settlements of these migrants in the
urban areas of Sindh.

This is an English translation by Madhulika Reddy of the
original Gennan book fIrst published by Verlag W. Kohlhammer in 1984,
under the title: Nord-SUd Beziehungen: Geschichte-Politik-Wirtschaft. It
deals with the complex economic relationship between the highly
developed industrial countries of the North and the underdeveloped
countries of the South in the perspective of history, sociology, and
political economy. The nature, scope, and range of many diffIcult
problems of North-South relations, in their historical context and in
their socio-economic and political contents, give this book an aura of
urgency and immediacy. These issues directly impinge not only on the
lives of millions of human beings living in the developing countries of
Asia, Africa, and Latin America who have been making strenuous efforts
to solve the chronic problems of poverty, unemployment,
underdevelopment, illiteracy, disease, and general social stagnation,
but also affect the affluent people of the North who face the insidious
threats of creeping recession, recurring unemployment, and falling
productivity in their economies for lack of effective demand for their
manufactures of high technology on the part of the disadvantaged
developing countries.

A quite large number of developing countries in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, which are today characterised by chronic
underdevelopment, general social retardation, slow social mobility, and
political instability became highly prone to military interventions in
politics in their initial phases of decolonization soon after World War
II. These military interventions in the fragile civil polities and
stagnant economies, termed by some scholars as the coup zone, are
justified and legitimised on various pretexts of modernisation,
democratisation, and reform; which means that the military seeks to fill
the institutional vacuum when the overall civil administration of the
country breaks down as a consequence of the rivalry for pelf and power
between various ruling classes. Thus, the military has emerged as the
most powerful institution in these countries. Some social revolutions of
modern times, in China in 1949, for example, and in Cuba in 1959, were
caused by endemic military interventions in the civil
society.

The Martial Law regime which came into power in Pakistan on
July 5, 1977 after a political crisis undertook a comprehensive scheme
of Islamizing the political, legal, economic and educational areas of
the Pakistani society. Ordinances and Laws on Zakat (poor-due), 'Ushr
(tithe), elimination of riba (interest/ usury), profit and loss scheme,
mudaraba (profit-sharing), and twelve modes of Islamic finance, were
promulgated with the avowed aim of transforming the Pakistani economy
into an Islamic economic system. In this article we shall confine
ourselves to an examination of the Islamization of the economy only;
that is, the article shall focus on the relationship between religion
and economics in general, and Islam and economics in particular. Since
the times of Adam Smith (1720-1790), and especially after the works of
Lionel Robbins (1898-1984) the modern economy is generally taken by the
economists as an autonomous economic system and modern economics, an
important branch of the social sciences, has gradually become
independent from religion. In both capitalist and socialist versions,
economics is generally defined as the "study of the social laws
governing production and distribution of the material means of
satisfying human needs" [Lange (1963)].

Deveiopment planning in India, as in other developing
countries, has generally been aimed at fostering an
industrially-oriented policy as the engine of economic growth. This
one-sided economic development, which results in capital formation,
creation of urban elites, and underprivileged social classes of a modern
society, has led to distortions in the social structure as a whole. On
the contrary, as a result of this uneven economic development, which is
narrowly measured in terms of economic growth and capital formation, the
fruits of development have gone to the people according to their
economic power and position in the social structure: those occupying
higher positions benefiting much more than those occupying the lower
ones. Thus, development planning has tended to increase inequalities and
has sharpened divisive tendencies. Victor S. D'Souza, an eminent Indian
sociologist, utilizing the Indian census data of 1961, 1971, and 1981,
examines the problem of structural inequality with particular reference
to the Indian Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes - the two most
underprivileged sections of the present Indian society which, according
to the census of 1981, comprised 15.75 percent and 7.76 percent of
India's population respectively. Theoretically, he takes the concept of
development in a broad sense as related to the self-fulfIlment of the
individual. The transformation of the unjust social structure, the
levelling down of glaring economic and social inequalities, and the
concern for the development of the underprivileged are for the author
the basic elements of a planned development. This is the theoretical
perspective of the first chapter, "Development Planning and Social
Transformation".

After almost forty-four years of existence as a sovereign
nation, Pakistan still remains an underdeveloped country. This
underdevelopment and poverty is not the original state, that is, it is
not entirely inherent in the original social and economic structures or
cultural traditions of Pakistan; rather this socio-economic retardation
of Pakistan is due mainly to the integration of Pakistan's society and
economy in the world capitalist system. This integration of a weak and
stagnant semi-feudal society with the industrially advanced capitalist
societies has gradually resulted in an unequal relationship and an
international division of labour, which binds Pakistan as a 'periphery'
to the highly developed and industrialized metropolitan 'centres' of
capitalism, and in which resources tend to flow from the former to the
latter. Hassan N. Gardezi advances this radical hypothesis by
characterizing Pakistan's socio-economic formation as 'peripheral'
capitalism which is internally ruled by a tiny, but powerful, minority
of feudal, capitalist, bureaucratic, and military elites. These ruling
elites, says Gardezi, are externally dependent on and subservient to the
highly industrialized capitalist countries; and the colonial factor has
determined the contours and character of Pakistan's socio-economic
system.