Published in conjunction with the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), Georgia Institute of Technology.

From the Introduction:
"The election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1997 signaled renewed interest in IT and the Internet. The BJP advocated economic liberalization and listed IT as one of the government's top five priorities, along with more traditional issues such as the provision of potable drinking water and education [10]. "Indian IT has had many small voices, but the BJP is attempting to give IT a national voice" [10]. In May 1998, Prime Minister Vajpayee organized a national IT task force to make recommendations for a comprehensive policy overhaul. The task force's recommendations were instrumental in initiating wide-ranging and fundamental changes in Indian IT policy.

The speed with which the Indian National Task Force on Information Technology and Software Development moved was indicative of the changing government attitude. Within 90 days of its establishment, the Task Force produced an extensive background report on the state of technology in India and an IT Action Plan with 108 recommendations [10,11]. The Task Force could act quickly because it built upon the experience and frustrations of state governments, central government agencies, universities, and the software industry. Much of what it proposed was also consistent with the thinking and recommendations of international bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and World Bank. In addition, the Task Force incorporated the experiences of Singapore and other nations, which implemented similar programs. It was less a task of invention than of sparking action on a consensus that had already evolved within the networking community and government.

Prime Minister Vajpayee captured the changing attitude toward technology in India in his claim that "IT is India's Tomorrow" [13]. This assessment offers a vision of a 21st century India substantially different from that of the 20th century. With its high levels of poverty, bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, protectionist policies, and large size, 20th century India was like the Asian elephant, plodding and turning slowly. At the dawn of a new millennium, Vajpayee and a growing number of politicians, bureaucrats, industry leaders, foreign investors, and bright-eyed entrepreneurs are trying to teach this Asian elephant to dance [14]."

China and the World Trade Organization

On balance, will the nation's accession to WTO help or hurt rural residents? How will they affect rural incomes? Who in the rural economy will get hurt? Are there some in the rural economy who will be insulated from the effects of WTO?

The general goal of our essay will be to begin the discussion of these critical questions. In particular, we will attempt to meet this broad goal by pursuing three sets of objectives. First, we will examine the record of rural incomes, in general, and then focus on how employment may be affected by China's accession to WTO.

Second, we will attempt to understand how WTO will affect the agriculture sector, in particular. To do so, we will provide measures of the distortions in China's agricultural sector at a time immediately prior to the nation's accession to WTO and seek to assess how well integrated China's markets are in order to understand which areas of the country and which segments of the farming population will likely be isolated from or affected by the changes that WTO will bring. Ultimately, with a knowledge of the size and magnitude of the impacts, researchers will be better able to begin working on understanding how the policies that WTO will impose on China will change the gap between the domestic and international price and affect imports and exports, domestic production and production, prices, income and poverty.

Third, we will examine the policy options that the government has available to them in the wake of WTO.