Articles by DN

The successful functioning of micro-finance institutions in several developing countries has fostered the rise of a new economic ethic. MFIs have helped in the successful inculcation of the saving habit, encouraged loan repayment as per a pre-set schedule, ensured the separation of the public and private spheres and overseen the commercialisation of economic life. Under this economic ethic, more than hierarchy or other traditional demarcations of status, it is money, the possession of it and its use in commercial commodity production that forms the measure of most things ? in determining transactions, relationships and status.

The evolution of micro-finance based NGOs into very large concerns operating in diverse sectors raises issues of regulation and accountability. In Bangladesh Grameen and BRAC have now effectively become brand names and have launched several productive initiatives. The government is struggling to come up with a regulatory framework for large NGOs. There are proposals to introduce a law of the cooperative type, which would give governments wide powers.

these commodity or service chains and thus lead to controlling firms to set up Elucidating the Social alternative chains. Further, their competition is not with the small capital in which Muslims have a presence, but Structure of Accumulation India Working: Essays on Society and Economy, Barbara Harriss-White; Cambridge University Press, 2003; PP XXXVIII + 316, Rs 950.

If SARS showed the weakness of the centralised and authoritarian Chinese political system, it also exposed the fact that in giving primacy to business profits, Toronto could let down its guard too soon. It is not only the lack of democracy, but also the enshrining of profits that is a culprit.

Instead of the isolation or quasi-isolation of 'localisation', what is needed is to change the terms on which the local of the developing world interacts with the global.