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ShareFear Of Obama IT Protectionism Policy Spreads In India
Posted by Bob Evans on Mar 2, 2009 01:46 PM
In the handful of days since President Obama vowed to punish U.S. "corporations that ship our jobs overseas," the backlash in India against such a disastrous move has spread to officials from government, IT industry associations, and leading Indian IT services companies such as Infosys and Wipro. And while they say they want to wait for more details, they are also clearly deeply concerned about the huge implications such policy would have.
While today's highly interdependent global economy renders Obama's 19th-century notion of "our jobs" meaningless, the bigger issues are the impact such a move would have on the overall Indian economy's ability to continue being a major consumer of U.S.-made products and services, and the likelihood that other countries would react to Obama's protectionist stance with their own equally unproductive and trade-reducing positions.
And the volume of concern from India in particular has been growing rapidly, from a handful of articles late last week about how the administration's position on "our jobs" had rattled the Indian IT services industry, to a list of 115 articles this morning from a Google search. Here are some samples:
India is a tremendously important global partner for the United States, and not only with regard to IT services. It's the largest democracy in the world and our two countries have developed an extensive and impressive record in welcoming each other's citizens and enriching each others efforts in entrepreneurship, academia, global defense, and culture. As such, the administration's proposed protectionist plans, while sounding comforting to a limited slice of the U.S. labor force, would be a damaging blow to a country on which we've come to depend very heavily.
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