Monday, November 12, 2007
Leapfrogging or piggybacking?
The economies of India and China are not as sophisticated as they appear
The back of Gopal Raj’s book “Reach for the Stars” carries a black-and-white photograph of the nose cone of a sounding rocket, carried on the back of a bicycle. The book chronicles the unlikely beginnings of India’s space programme, which launched its first rocket in 1963 from Thumba, a fishing village in the state of Kerala. Thumba was chosen as the launch site in preference to another location whose name translated as “White Elephant Island”.
The programme’s founder had little patience for scoffers. “One is often told that such and such a thing is too sophisticated” for a developing nation, he wrote. But “I have a dream, a fantasy maybe, that we can leapfrog our way to development.”
India’s path since then has remained idiosyncratic. The skills demanded by its industries are those of a much richer country. This can be shown, roughly, by statistics; more sharply by anecdote. General Electric’s technology centre in Bengalooru (formerly Bangalore), to pick one, is working on advanced propulsion systems for jet engines. India’s Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) produces the software for Ferrari’s Formula One cars. India’s drugmakers offer 60,000 finished medicines; only three countries produce a bigger volume.
China’s evolution also has its peculiarities. In 1964, recently estranged from its Soviet patron, it devoted a larger share of its GDP (1.7%) to R&D than it ever has since. But after the decade-long Cultural Revolution, this is how one study described the state of its industry on the eve of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in 1978: “vans and transformers that failed to keep out rainwater, sewing machines that leaked oil onto the fabric, power tillers rusting outside a factory that churned out fresh batches of unwanted inventory”.
Now, according to Dani Rodrik of Harvard University, China’s exports are as sophisticated as those of a country three times richer. The goods it sells to America overlap to a surprising extent with the merchandise America buys from members of the OECD, a club of rich democracies, argues Peter Schott of Yale. By this measure, China’s exports are more highly evolved than those of Brazil or Israel.
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Publication : The Economist print edition
Date : 08 November, 2007
Posted by TallyAcademy on 11/12 at 11:31 PM
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Saturday, November 10, 2007
XBRL- The New Language Business
XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language, an Internet business language, is purported to revolutionize the way business reporting will be done in the next two or three years. The idea behind XBRL is simple. Instead of treating financial information as a block of text - as in a standard internet page or a printed document - it provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data. D Kalyanaraman tells more about this new language.
CW: What is XBRL?
D KALYANARAMAN: XBRL is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is revolutionizing business reporting around the world. It provides major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information. It offers cost savings, greater efficiency and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data. It belongs to the family of “XML” languages and is being developed by an international non-profit consortium of approximately 450 major companies, organizations and government agencies. It is an open standard, free of license fees. It is already being put to practical use in a number of countries and is growing rapidly around the world.
CW: How does XBRL work?
KALYANARAMAN: XBRL provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data. This is computer readable. For example, company net profit has its own unique tag. Computers can treat XBRL data “intelligently”. They can recognize the information in a XBRL document, select, analyze, store and exchange it with other computers and present it automatically in a variety of ways for users. XBRL is a powerful and flexible version of XML which has been defined specifically to meet the requirements of business and financial information. It enables unique identifying tags to be applied to items of financial data, such as ‘net profit’. However, these are more than simple identifiers. They provide a range of information about the item, such as whether it is a monetary item, percentage or fraction. XBRL can show how items are related to one another. It can thus represent how they are calculated. It can also identify whether they fall into particular groupings for organizational purposes. XBRL is also easily extensible, so organizations can adapt it to meet a variety of special requirements.
CW: What are the benefits of XBRL?
KALYANARAMAN: XBRL tags enable automated processing of business information by computer software, cutting out laborious and costly processes of manual re-entry and comparison. XBRL greatly increases the speed of handling of financial data, reduces the chance of error and permits automatic checking of information. Companies can use XBRL to save costs and streamline their processes for collecting and reporting financial information. XBRL can handle data in different languages and accounting standards. It can flexibly be adapted to meet different requirements and uses.
CW: What are the global standards applied in XBRL?
KALYANARAMAN: There are two key standards as follows:
XBRL Taxonomies - These are the categorization schemes which define the specific tags for individual items of data (such as “net profit"). National jurisdictions have different accounting regulations, so each may have its own taxonomy for financial reporting. A special taxonomy has also been designed to support collation of data and internal reporting within organizations. This is the GL taxonomy. Ordinary users of XBRL may be largely or totally unaware of the technical infrastructure which underpins the language. However, software companies, such as accountancy software providers, need to take account of XBRL and its features when producing their products.
XBRL International - XBRL International is a not-for-profit consortium of approximately 550 companies and agencies worldwide working together to build the XBRL language and promote and support its adoption. The consortium members meet periodically at international conferences, conduct committee work regularly via conference calls, and communicate in email and phone calls throughout the week.
The XBRL International Steering Committee governs XBRL International. The Steering Committee has the same authority and powers as the Board of Directors at most other companies. This includes responsibility for setting technical, financial and operational strategy within the organization.
The Steering Committee comprises elected representatives from Established jurisdictions and eight At-Large representatives as well as one seat committed to the AICPA for a period of time. These representatives can represent the perspectives of supply chain communities who are greatly influential in the field of XBRL development.
CW: Which are the other applications and domains that can use XBRL?
KALYANARAMAN: XBRL can also handle:
A. Business reporting to all types of regulators, including tax and financial authorities, central banks and governments.
B. Filing of loan reports and applications; credit risk assessments.
C. Exchange of information between government departments or between institutions, such as central banks.
D. Authoritative accounting literature - providing a standard way of describing accounting documents provided by authoritative bodies.
E. A wide range of other financial and statistical data which needs to be stored exchanged and analyzed.
CW: What is Tally’s expertise in this domain?
KALYANARAMAN: As an initiator of XBRL we have team of experts who is having a good knowledge bank oN what is the Taxonomy, how it works and what are the technical requirements to create Indian Taxonomy and mapping of it’s with other Taxonomy etc.
CW: How is the company tapping XBRL in India?
KALYANARAMAN: Tally has sponsored seminars in the past to promote the standard or technology in India as part of awareness creation. Tally would support the initiative in India in the future, as XBRL is set to become the standard way of recording, storing and transmitting business financial information. It is capable of use throughout the world, whatever the language of the country is concerned, for a wide variety of business purposes. It will deliver major cost savings and gains in efficiency, improving processes in companies, governments and other organizations.
Publication : Indian Channel World
Date : 08 November, 2007
Posted by TallyAcademy on 11/10 at 11:26 PM
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