The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Meet on implications of WTO for economy

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 18, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Meet on implications of WTO for economy

Staff Reporter

"No solution to problems of developing countries"

CHENNAI: The Economics Research Department of A.M. Jain College conducted a State-level symposium on the `Implications of WTO for Indian Economy' on Thursday.

Highlighting the pre- and post-liberalisation growth rates in India, M. Naganathan, head of the Madras University's economics department, said that only the service sector witnessed progressive employment trend in the liberalisation period. Poverty widened the difference between rural and urban areas, a scenario that repeated in many developing nations. In this background, WTO negotiations in the last decade failed to bring out any concrete proposal to resolve the problem of developing countries. The trade policies of rich nations continued to deny poor countries and poor people a fair share of global prosperity.

R. Madhumati, faculty member, Department of Management, Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, said the WTO addressed information technology trade in three ways: work programme on e-commerce, negotiations under the Doha development agenda and information technology agreement.

In `movement of natural persons,' where many developing nations, including India, had comparative advantage, the commitment levels of developed nations were very low.

Few commitments

Fresh negotiations on services that began in 2000 ended in only six proposals being taken up for consideration. Social sectors such as health, education and BPOs received very few commitments.

N. Durairaj, Director, Thanthai Hansrover College, Perambalur, highlighted the impact of WTO proposal on Indian industry.

D. Narasimhan from Madras Christian College spoke on the implications of TRIPS on agricultural sector.

K. Sethuraman, principal, A.M. Jain College, and R. Vaithianathan, head of the department of economics, were among those who spoke. Twenty faculty and 40 research scholars from more than 10 city colleges and Anna University participated.

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