The journey to have a common set of accounting standards started long before to give it a professional shape and essence. And accountants all over the world feel the necessity to shorten the gap among different streams of accounting practices through harmonization. Still, we have a couple of strong variants of accounting practices (say, for example, US GAAP, UK GAAP, IAS etc.) over the world existed and practiced simultaneously. These variants are working as threats towards harmonization of accounting practices. However, the profession has also witnessed some improvements in recent years in the process of global convergence putting some ray of hope. International and even local standard setting bodies have come up with projects of harmonization and in most of the cases became successful.The day is not far away when we will observe that accounting world is controlled and guided by a single set of standards giving it a status of legal discipline in true sense. The paper focuses on this harmonization issue, its current status, challenges with special reference to Indian perspective.

Corporate environmental reporting becomes a crucial issue in today's corporate reporting. The present status and future focus gives every indication that it is going to capture a permanent position in the bundle of general-purpose financial statement. Because, the corporate reporting is for the stakeholders and every stakeholders show a keen interest on such disclosure. Protecting the environment is the social responsibility and commitment of corporations towards the society. It is believed that corporation is responsible for the environmental crisis and so they should pay for this (cost-benefit trade off). However, reporting is mostly guided by standards, guidelines etc. And, we do not have any standards designed for such disclosure. So, such reporting is still voluntary that has no specific format and style. Voluntary disclosure often leads to non-disclosure and mandatory disclosure leads to minimal disclosure. Thus, environmental disclosure should have both type of orientation, as it is a question of life and sustainability. The paper gives a conceptual discussion on corporate environmental reporting and guidelines. It also gives a literature review of current reporting practices to highlights the developments till date. And, this concludes that the level, extent and style of disclosure are not satisfactory at all in any respect. The professionals and respective regulatory authorities should come forward with stricter standards and guidelines to this issue that is the demand of time.

Accounting has no meaning without standards due to professionalism. The use and application of standards in accounting gets so importance that it will not go wrong if it is termed as a legal discipline. By the time, the world has given accounting the certification of international discipline. So, it is apt to say that as an international discipline, accounting should have a single set of standards for all for harmonizing the practice in a global scenario. But the reality is that we still have various streams of accounting standards like US GAAP, UK GAAP, IAS, and so on. These different streams are the threat for accounting against its harmonization of practices. Though the world has witnessed a lot of initiatives taken to reduce the streams into one in recent years, still we cannot ensure the final sophistication in this regard. The paper focuses on the convergence issue, its current status, challenges with special reference to Indian perspective.

During the post 1990 period, service sector in most of the Asian economies witnessed growth fueled by significant changes in their financial sector. India is now being ranked as one of the fastest growing economy of the world. During last one decade or so, role of Indian insurance and mutual fund industry as a significant financial service in financial market has really been noteworthy. In fact since 1992, a number of research studies have underlined the importance of these two in the Indian capital market environment as important investment vehicles. But the existing 'Behavioral Finance' studies on factors influencing selection of mutual fund and life insurance schemes are very few and very little information is available about investor perceptions, preferences, attitudes and behavior. Yet again, perhaps no efforts are made to analyze and compare the selection behavior of Indian retail investors towards mutual funds and life insurances particularly in post-liberalization period. With this background this paper makes an earnest attempt to study the behavior of the investors in the selection of these two investment vehicles in an Indian perspective by making a comparative study.

Consumers' buying behavior is divergent and situational. For durable products, such behavior got different dimensions again. To make the study simple and informative, color television is used to represent the consumer durable markets. Television, as a product, is getting the status of essential commodity all over the world. The potential of TV market is indeed quite enormous. The Indian consumers were indifferent in choosing the brand since a lot of close substitutes were available in the market. However, they have changed ever since the India liberalized its economy. Choosing the right brand of television is difficult enough when there were half a dozen brands and all of these claimed to give excellent picture quality. Marketing managers are interested not only in the product but also the behavior of the consumers because it gives them the right orientations for product development and positioning. The level of consumer's satisfaction provides the scope for repeated purchases and brand loyalty that lead to optimum profitability. This research finds that consumers' perception on buying color television is mostly affected by the factors, such as, structural add-ons, words of mouth, technical features, durability, ground reality etc.