Contents: 1. 'Efficient' and 'minimum mean squared error' ARIMA Forecast for GDP in the economy of India by the Box-Jenkins (BJ) Methodology/Chandan Kumar Mukhopadhyay and Amit Kundu. 2. Gender differentials in rural work: an assessment in a regional context/Sanchari Roy Mukherjee and Panchali Sengupta. 3. People on the shift: character and significance of migration in urban informal sector/Kanak Kanti Bagchi and Nirupam Gope. 4. Expansion of Indo-US trade: a quantitative analysis/Anil Bhuimali and Sidhartha Sankar Laha. 5. Changing India's trade pattern: a time series analysis/Anil Bhuimali and Sidhartha Sankar Laha. 6. ARIMA forecasting for exchange rate (INR/NR) quoted in Indo-Nepal trade: a study with Box-Jenkins methodology/C.K. Mukhopadhyay and Shyam Charan Barma. 7. India under free trade regime/Anil Bhuimali and Tulika Kar. 8. Structural changes in the causal relationship between money and price level in the economy of Nepal--a recursive estimation study/Chandan Kumar Mukhopadhyay and Shyam Charan Barma. 9. Impact of tourism on mountain environment in Nepal/Anil Bhuimali and Kamanand Dev. 10. GARCH error based ARIMA forecast for GDP in Sri Lanka/Chandan Kumar Mukhopadhyay and Amit Kundu. 11. A mathematical exposition of the Lechatelier principle for the determination of short and long-run price elasticity relationship in factor and commodity markets/Tamash Ranjan Majumdar. 12. Relationship between budget deficit and interest rate in the economy of Sri Lanka--an econometric study/Chandan Kumar Mukhopadhyay and Kanchan Datta. 13. Fiscal synchronization in Maldives--a study with vector autoregression, impulse response function and variance decomposition/Chandan Kumar Mukhopadhyay and Biswajit Maitra. 14. Vector autoregression model for exchange rate--a study with impulse response functions and variance decomposition/Chandan Kumar Mukhopadhyay and Biswajit Maitra.

"Countries of the world today are in favour of free trade globally. Before the formation of WTO in 1995 the GATT had been trying to achieve free trade throughout the world. The similar activity is being done by the WTO since its inception. In spite of all such efforts many countries in groups are trying to form unions separately to protect their group interest. One such group is the SAARC--the eight South Asian Nations' coalition. The present book is the result of SAP(DRS) programme of the UGC started in the Department of Economics, North Bengal University since 2004. The papers contain social and economic aspects of most of the SAARC member countries." (jacket)