India’s Role in South Asia Trade and Investment Integration

Recent developments in South Asian countries, especially the re-emergence of democratic governments, new growth momentum despite the global economic downturn and greater openness, warrant a fresh look at the region’s prospects for economic integration. On the basis of a thorough review of the literature on potential and prospects of regional integration in South Asia and after examining the trends in intra-SAARC trade and investment flows, this paper finds that the progress in regional cooperation has been far short of potential. The paper, therefore, focuses on the ‘real impediments’ to regional integration and on that basis makes a set of policy oriented recommendations for furthering deeper regional integration in South Asia. It also emphasizes that given its dominant size, human resources, and aspirations for a global role, India will have to take on a disproportionately larger responsibility for promoting regional cooperation in South Asia. However, regional integration will not be achieved by India’s unilateral actions alone. Neighboring governments will have to respond positively to Indian initiatives for successful regional integration in South Asia.South Asia; economic integration; regional trade; foreign direct investment

Kagome lattice antiferromagnets and Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya interactions

We study the consequences of in-plane (D_p) and out-of-plane (D_z) Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya (DM) interactions on the thermodynamic properties of spin-1/2} Heisenberg model on the kagome lattice using numerical linked cluster expansions and exact diagonalization, and contrast them with those of other perturbations such as exchange anisotropy and dilution. We find that different combinations of the DM anisotropies lead to a wide variety of thermodynamic behavior, which are quite distinct from those of most other perturbations. We argue that the sudden upturn seen experimentally in the susceptibility of the material ZnCu3(OH)6Cl2 can be understood in terms of Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya anisotropies with D_p>|D_z|. We also show that the measured specific heat of the material puts further constraints on the allowed DM parameters.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figures. Content, references, and comments on recent experiments have been added. Published versio