Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 20 September 2013

Booker Prize now open for all authors writing in English

• The Man Booker Prize, described as the “the most important and influential award for literary fiction in the English speaking world” might from now on actually qualify for that claim.

• According to an announcement by Jonathan Taylor, Chair of the Booker Prize, the prize will from 2014 be expanded to include writers in English from any part of the world provided their books have been published in the United Kingdom.

• Thus far the Booker Prize was for literary fiction by authors from the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe.
• The enlargement of the Booker’s catchment is expected to put more pressure not just on writers who now have more competition, but on judges too, now that its doors have been open to competing fiction from the cross-Atlantic English-speaking nation that has its own distinct and vibrant literary tradition.
• The idea of instituting a separate Booker prize for English fiction for U.S. authors alone was considered but dismissed as it would end up diluting the prestige of the prize.

No piecemeal climate deal, India tells United Nations

• India has opposed proposals to sign a piecemeal global climate treaty with greenhouse gas reduction targets being decided first in 2015 and decisions on technology and finance adaptation being segregated and postponed for later years.
• The global community is to sign a new compact on climate change under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by 2015.
• The negotiations for this deal have been on since 2011 and are beginning to heat up with the next big meeting — referred to as the Conference of Parties (COP), slated for this November in Warsaw, Poland.
• Perceiving that the developed countries have through the year been pushing at a piecemeal approach to the global deal, India has put in a submission to the UNFCCC, advocating that all elements of the deal — mitigation, adaptation, technology and finance — should be addressed at the same time as part of a balanced package.
• Any action by the developing countries to reduce emissions is required to be enabled by funds and technology from the developed world under the UNFCCC.
• This linkage between the provision of enabling finance and technology has been diluted over the past few years through successive decisions at the annual COPs. But, the recent push from the developed world to postpone final decisions on all other elements of the 2015 deal, except for mitigation, has been read in the Indian camp as a grand ploy to completely de-link the actions of the developing countries from the support they should rightfully be getting under the UNFCC to achieve these goals.
• The Ad-Hoc Working Group is one track of negotiations under the UNFCCC. It was launched in 2011.
• This track itself has two distinct streams of talks.
• One of the two is meant to finalise the new global deal meant to be signed by 2015 and operationalised by 2020.
• The other stream of talks is also meant to produce decisions on what actions can be taken between now and 2020.
• The submissions from the U.S. and the EU in the run-up to the November COP meeting have not inspired much confidence in the Indian negotiating team either. The focus in the submissions has remained strongly on fixing the nature of mitigation actions that they propose should be undertaken in the 2015 compact.
• On this they have presented detailed suggestions. Their submissions on funds to be made available to the developing world for adaptation, on the other hand, have remained rather general.

Surprise by federal reserve

• In a development that stunned not just the U.S. markets, the U.S. Federal Reserve sprang a big surprise by keeping its $85 billion a month asset purchase programme intact for at least a few more months.
• The ultrasoft monetary policy, designed to keep interest rates in the U.S. abnormally low to aid recovery in the post-recession period, would continue most probably at least until the end of the year.
• The implication of this has not been lost on stock markets everywhere.
• Soon after the announcement, the U.S. benchmark index S&P was pushed up to record levels.

• New records were set by the hour in India and many other Asian markets which had ample time to react to the Fed announcement. On Thursday, the Sensex and the Nifty gained 685 points and 216 points respectively.

• Although many other factors — the weak economy and the large current account deficit — were cited, the principal cause has been the flight of short-term capital flows back to the U.S., sensing the possibility of better returns there.
• Indeed, one of the principal reasons for the Fed going slow is its revised perception of the U.S. economy not being robust enough to dispense with the huge monetary stimulus.
• Recent employment data have also not been up to the mark and the Fed says it is worried over the possibility of a political impasse in the Congress.
• The Fed’s surprise action is designed solely for the U.S. economy but it does give hard-pressed developing economies such as India’s breathing space to carry out structural reform.
• A reduction in the policy rates may not be on the cards yet — inflation has surged — but the tight money conditions imposed in mid-July to support the rupee might be loosened if not done away with altogether.

Sources: Various News Paper