China

One of the most significant events scheduled to take place at the Fourth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation at Doha, Qatar, is the formal entry of China into the trade body, along with a few other nations. China is one of the world’s largest traders, capable of using its enormous imports to exert influence on foreign governments. Such a country has been campaigning hard to find its way into the WTO and has made remarkable concessions to the US and the European Union to obtain their agreement to its inclusion among WTO members. Indian politicians who demand that India should walk out of the WTO if the Doha meet launches a new round of trade talks ignoring India’s opposition to such a move would do well to ponder over the imperatives that drove China to yield the significant concessions that it has, in order to gain membership of the multilateral trade organisation. The simple fact is that multilateral rules, rule making and rule enforcement are of great help to countries that seek to gain from trade. In the absence of such rules and mechanisms to enforce them, countries would have to depend on bilateral deals. Apart from increasing transaction costs, bilateral dealings would also prove more iniquitous for India, whose share in world exports is all of 0.7 per cent, given the great disparity in economic size or trade volumes between India and its major trading partners.

Water supplied free to urban centres imposes costs on the upland watershed. The paper analyses the conflicts and costs of such provision of external ecosystem services in a case in Yunnan, China. It argues that in order to internalise the external costs of such water supply, there should be a locally embedded system of forest management. It further argues that pricing of these external ecosystem products, like water, is needed to enable local communities to balance the benefits from their sale against costs and other benefits.

It seems likely now that the Henderson Brooks Report on the debacle in the border war with China, completed in 1963, will never be released. Furthermore, even if one day a stable, confident and relaxed government in New Delhi should, miraculously, appear and decide to publish it, the text would be largely incomprehensible, the context, well known to the authors and therefore not spelled out, being now forgotten. The report would need an introduction and gloss - a first draft of which this essay attempts to provide, drawing upon the author's research in India in the 1960s and material published later.

Absence of a land market, production for export, an educated labour force and a greater identification of labourers in a large number of enterprises (the township and village enterprises) with the results of their labour are some of the factors accounting for China's higher productivity and thus competitiveness in the world market.