1. IFC’s study involved interviews with almost seventy JVs in six developing countries : Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, the Philippines and Turkey.

1. These countries represent a fairly wide spectrum of income levels, but they are similar in the sense that all are home to a variety of JVs of the type sought for the study.
2. Sometimes these JVs have been motivated primarily by government regulations that prevented foreign companies from investing alone.
3. Sometimes other motivations were primary. 
4. In every case, however, it was IFC’s purpose to investigate in some detail how these JVs came together, what difficulties arose in negotiating the agreements and what problems arose during implementation and operation of the joint venture.

6. Although IFC attempted to asses the success or failure, as well as the future, of included JVs, this aspect of the study was not a major goal.

1. Men have cleared away forests to make fields for growing crops.

1. They have moved mountains to make room for roads and cities, they have built huge dams across rivers to turn valley into lakes, and have built dykes to push back the sea and create more dry land to live on.
2. When the Aswan Dam was built across the River Nile in Egypt, it was meant to help the farmers by giving them water when they needed.
3. Once everyone cheered at the progress that man made in changing his environment like this, but now many people are worried by the problems that such changes can bring.
4. Unfortunately, people did not realize that much of the nourishing food for plants carried by the river would be trapped by the dam, so the farmer’s crops would suffer.

6. Also, hundreds of kilometers away at the mouth of the river Nile, less fresh water pours into the Mediterranean Sea, thereby making the sea water more salty and decreasing the availability of fish, as a result people who catch fish for their living will suffer drastically.

1. The agreement will extend and clarify the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade reached in the Tokyo Round.

1. The agreement therefore encourages countries to use international standards where these are appropriate.
2. It seeks to ensure that technical negotiations and standards, as well as testing and certification procedures, do not create unnecessary obstacles to trade. 
3. Countries should not be prevented from taking measures necessary to ensure that those levels of protection are met.
4. However, it recognizes that countries have the right to establish protection, at levels they consider appropriate.

6. But at the same time, it does not require them to change their levels of protection as a result of standardization.

1. The gradual shift to an industrial economy seemingly made growth more controllable and predictable.

1. At the same time, the rise of the modern stock and bond markets in the second half of the 1800s provided financing for large capital projects on a scale never before dreamed of.
2. The dawn of mass production permitted industrial economies to achieve unprecedented growth rates and living standards.
3. The new source of wealth was systematic investment in capital goods, which could be used to multiply human productivity.
4. No longer was prosperity tied to the harvest or the vagaries of colonial exploitation.

6. It soon became clear, however, that industrial economies were prone to new types of economic fluctuations that were in many ways more violent than any country had experienced before.

1. The fashionable source of anxiety in both Europe and Asia is whether America is becoming so different from other nations that it is becoming a problem for the world, not a solution.
2. On this view, the U.S. is now inherently assertive and unilateralist, and so can no longer be trusted to lead the world; instead it should be feared.
3. Now, few pundits anguish about whether their countries have to become more like America.
4. It is not just a reckless Bush administration leading America astray, in other words.
5. Until a little over two years ago, the fashionable topic for debate in conferences, opinion pages and even bars around d the world was whether globalization was really Americanization, and whether that was a good or bad thing.