University Library, University of North Bengal

EDITORIAL

Creation of knowledge through business research contributes to improved decision making when it is communicated and disseminated to scholars and business professionals who are in search of effective business strategies and endeavour to take direction or inspiration from the new information, and in turn develop more new knowledge. Universities have a key role to play in this area since knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination are principal activities of faculty and scholars serving institutions of higher learning. It is on this principle that the Department of Commerce derives the inspiration to publish the second volume of the journal. In all probability, the most important role journals in commerce and management play is building up an archive of knowledge so that scholars and professionals can get access to comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative information in a variety of specialisations and super specialisations. In addition to this, journals published from universities attempt to play a role in upholding academic and professional standards in how research and scholarship are conducted. It is because of this reason that journals usually have to filter what is published and disseminated. The editors of this journal therefore subscribe to the notion that the necessity of peer review is based on the assumption that it provides a valid measure of the quality of a manuscript and its adherence to the norms of the journal. ANWESHAN seeks to publish quality research work with evidence and conclusions that are pertinent to problems and strategies in business environment in India and around the globe. We encourage contributors who attempt to develop and/or test theory, delve into attention-grabbing events in business and management and use a diverse range of research techniques that are based on statistical inferences, qualitative studies, case studies, conceptual debates and computational models. For this issue we have received papers on a wide variety of topics and have selected seven for publication. Tarak Nath Sahu, Kalpataru Bandopadhyay and Debasish Mondal investigates into the impact of the inflation rate on stock market in India during the period 1993 to 2013, explores into the long-run co-movement between the rate of inflation and stock prices in India and attempts to reveal whether inflation rate causes stock market movement in India. The authors suggest that the Indian stock markets are strongly exogenous in the sense that shocks to inflation rate explain only a small portion of the forecast variance error of the market indices and notices that a positive shock on inflation rate has a negative and persistent effect on Indian stock markets. Debasish Sur, Susanta Mitra and Sumit Kumar Maji draws on the fact that in the environ of diverse challenges in India arising out of the liberalisation measures taken by the Government of India, FMCG companies in India have made remarkable changes in their business policies which has resulted in considerable changes in the pattern of business risk. In this backdrop, the authors seek to analyse the business risk associated with some selected companies in the Indian FMCG sector during the period 1995-96 to 2011-12. Debasis Bhattacharya and Shuvendu Dey attempt to identify the dimensions of store loyalty with specific focus on its antecedents such as Trust, Value for Money and Satisfaction provide retailers with a view to provide information about Indian customers’ store loyalty determinants. They propose that the information can be useful to retailers in Indian market for developing marketing strategies and considering how they can best position their stores in order to maintain customer loyalty. Hirak Ray and Joydeep Biswas examine whether adoption of IFRS reduces the home bias? The authors claim that the widespread adoption of IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) is unlikely to reduce the uncertainty about foreign financial reporting quality, familiarity bias, and geographical proximity bias that act as catalysts towards home bias. Manidipa DasGupta and Dhruba Ranjan Dandapat try to detect how far and to what extent the lack of technical knowledge of the managerial personnel is responsible for sickness in Small Engineering Enterprises of Howrah and suggest some remedial measures for improvement of the prevailing situation Mausumi Saha and Sharmistha Banerjee deliberate on the evolution of definitional criteria of the small scale sector in India as laid down by the concerned Ministry from the post-independence period till date and throw light upon the underlying ambiguities. The authors throw light on how other agencies have used different criteria for documentation which may have led to under/over estimation in the documentation of the performance of the sector. The authors posit the need for a uniform definition and standard documentation practice. Prakash Chandra Adhikary comes up with the facts that though Indo–Bangladesh border trade was first initiated in 1972 it was suspended within six months. Such a suspension caused great hardships to the rural people living either side of the border. Considering the urges of several state governments of the north-east India, the Govt. of India placed a new modified proposal of ‘Frontier Traffic’ at New Delhi trade discussion in May 1973 but failed. The author then attempts to trace the changes since the 1990s when SAPTA and later on SAFTA in compatible with WTO provisions for free-trade regime were introduced by the SAARC. I express my sincere thanks to all the authors who have burnt the midnight lamp and contributed their valuable time and effort for writing the articles for this journal. I am grateful to the erudite reviewers who have taken the pains to evaluate the articles and offer valuable suggestions and comments for appropriate refinement of the articles. I am also thankful to the authorities of University of North Bengal for sanctioning the finance required for publishing this journal. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to the officers and staff of North Bengal University press whose untiring efforts have led to the publication of the journal.

Prof. Samirendra Nath Dhar
Editor-in-Chief