The Hindu Business Line : Re-engineer your skills to cope with WTO challenges

BANANA war, Korean soju, bed linen, and codling moth: what's the common thread? All these are just a few of the international trade disputes that Palle Krishna Rao of PSG Institute of Management discusses in WTO: Text & Cases, from Excel Books. If you wonder if there's anything common between the WTO and CAs, please note that a recent posting on www.icai.org is The WTO Pathfinder - A Technical Update on WTO Matters - April 2005, where Kamlesh S. Vikamsey writes that the Institute has been trying its best to push for greater market access across the borders for CAs during the current negotiations under the WTO. And T. N. Manoharan exhorts accountants to re-engineer their skills to cope with the new challenges!

WTO or World Trade Organisation is very much in the news too. For instance, www.siliconindia.com reports about India pegging foreign direct investment (FDI) in telecom at 49 per cent in its recently submitted revised services offer to the WTO; and there are worries that textile exports dip despite end of quotas. For those who find the subject new, Rao's book has a tutorial beginning from GATT and ending in GATS, with a guided tour through many a `Round' and `Ministerial'.

Do you know that India's proposal for non-agricultural product market access negotiation spoke of "a simple linear cut on the individual bound tariff lines of each member, with a higher percentage cut for developed countries than for developing countries". Besides, "any tariff in excess of three times the national average tariff shall be reduced to no more than three times the national average which results after applying the initial linear cut," and there's a formula too.

The author devotes separate chapters to agreement on agriculture, sanitary/phytosanitary measures, TRIPS, Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), and textiles. Using bullets, boxes and simple language, Rao explains what can otherwise baffle many. For example, he summarises the types of standards in TBT thus: Packing standards such as dimensions, biodegradability of packaging material; process standards regulating either input material or technology used in the manufacture; and product standards relating to size, weight, safety and so on.

Part two of the book has 18 cases, and the discussion of each case is elaborate, with helpful visuals. The `Better Basmati than Havana' case informs that India is fighting scores of basmati patent cases in more than score countries. It seems the APEDA or the Agricultural and Processed Food Export Development Authority has been able to get the basmati trademark registered in Spain as one pertaining to `aromatic rice grown in the subcontinent'.

And in Brazil, APEDA was able to get the application for registration of basmati trademark to be used for sweets and condiments rejected! You can catch up with more on www.apeda.com: such as, `Comprehensive Study on the Status of Dehydration/Freeze Dried Industry & Its Export Potential' and `Packaging Standards for Frozen processed cut Vegetables' among the Authority's studies.

To navigate in the high seas, though, have Rao by your side.

Relationship or a ritual?

ACCOUNTANTS are often blamed for not communicating properly, so I decided to read a new title from Sage (www.sagepub.com), Communication as... Perspectives on Theory, edited by Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas. "One of our goals for this book has been to nudge, push, or openly cajole theorists and practitioners of communication toward a fundamental reappraisal of what is at stake when we think and write and talk and argue about our subject," states the intro, and that makes it all the more worthwhile to look into the 27 `freestanding arguments'.

Thus, Celeste M. Condit says communication is a process of relating, and `weaving and reweaving of visible and invisible four-dimensional webs'. To Eric W. Rothenbuhler, communication is a ritual, and I can remember nothing better than the routine auditors' report. "Ritual is the voluntary performance of appropriately patterned behaviour to symbolically effect or participate in the serious life," he defines.

Communication is transcendence for Gregory J. Shepherd, while Katherine Miller sees it as being `constructive'. It's a practice, "a coherent set of activities that are commonly engaged in, and meaningful in particular ways, among people familiar with a certain culture", says Robert T. Craig. Communication as collective memory, is how Carole Blair looks at the topic, and cites Friedrich Nietzche's answer to `what is truth?' thus: "Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins."

You may not accept that as a professional with the `true and fair' tag, yet this is a book you'd enjoy reading for the thoughts it communicates.

Accountancy unsuitable for women!

CHRISTOPHER Nobes packs in `the essentials' from A to Z in The Economist's Pocket Accounting, from Viva (www.vivagroupindia.com). The author explains the prevailing international differences in accounting by drawing our attention to the two main systems of law in the developed world. One, the codified law, originally Roman law, with its detailed scheme of penalties, "the basic stance being that there should be a law on any matter."

And two, the English system of common law, equity and case law; "accounting is not law but a mixture of art and science wherein highly trained professionals should be left to exercise their judgment (and charge their fees)". Nobes cites many interesting quotes, such as of the Council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales from its 1912 journal: "We have no desire to say anything that might tend to discourage women to embark on accountancy, for although women might make excellent book-keepers, there is much in accountancy proper that is, we think, unsuitable for them."

Here's another from Daniel Defoe's `The Complete English Tradesman': "A tradesman's books are his repeating clock, which upon all occasions are to tell him how he goes on, and how things stand with him in the world; there he will know when `tis time to go on, or when `tis time to give over... His books being so essential to his trade, he that comes out of his time without a perfect knowledge of the method of book-keeping, like a bride undrest, is not ready to be married; he knows not what to do, or what step to take."

In an otherwise straight book, you may have to bank upon wisecracks for some entertainment, and Nobes provides them in good measure. "Creditors have no real affection for their debtors, but only a desire that they may be preserved that they may repay," said Aristotle (384-322 BC) in `Nicomachean Ethics'. Just one more surreal quote to wrap up: "He's spending a year dead for tax reasons," a line from Douglas Adams!

Credit fun!

BooksOfAccount@TheHindu.co.in

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