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Effects of China's Software Policy on World Economy?
guptaparesh asks: "The Chinese government is currently engaged in a comprehensive overhaul of its procurement policies and regulations. These regulations would ban non-Chinese firms from selling software to the Chinese government. Given that how much trade all the countries in the world are engaged in with China, isn't this a unfair trade move by the Chinese government?" A better question would be how this might affect the worldwide economy, particularly that of the U.S. and China. What benefits and drawbacks may China see as a result of this new policy? What steps might the U.S. take to attempt to counter it?
No problem for guys the size of IBM, who can simply create bizzare chimeras with guys like Lenovo to produce things that are Chinese and US companies at the same time.
A friend of mine regularly chimes in that we have nothing to worry about from China because "...there is no way a nation that still has cases of Bubonic Plague and can't put electricity or roads across its entire landmass could possibly challenge US Superiority in what we do best..."
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I work for a U.S. government contractor. One of the rules that we have to comply with is that all of our software must be produced in the united states. We can't use open source code because some of it could be written outside of the US. We can't buy licenses for software libraries that could be produced overseas. It's to protect us from potentially malicious code.
This articles prevents the Chinese Government from buying software from outside of the country. There's still another 1.3 billion consumers there that don't directly work for the government. I don't see this to be a very big problem for US companies trying to sell products there.
There are plenty of things the US government will only purchase from US companies. If a country has no trade tarrifs or subsidies, their markets are open. You wouldn't advocate forcing corporations to purchase from foreign firms, why should governments be forced to? If the Chinese government doesn't want to purchase things from other countries, that is their right. If they start saying that no one can purchase things from other countries, then you can start invoking trade laws.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
over 2 billion people. about 1/3 of the world population is in China.
o stpopulous.htm
Ahem, you meant in China and India combined, didn't you? Both have about 1 billion populaion.
http://geography.about.com/cs/worldpopulation/a/m
That's very interesting because: a) they've artificially pegged the yuan-to-U.S.-dollar exchange rate at 8.2765 .78 Euros...
b) the U.S dollar has been dropping substantially in value in comparison to many other major currencies, over the last 4 years. In May 2001, it took about 1.14 Euros to buy 1 US dollar; now it takes about
The dollar's been rising lately though. At the beginning of the year, it only took .76 Euros to buy a dollar.
Assuming China's currency really is undervalued, because they're tied to the dollar at a fixed rate, then the US dollar is overvalued (or another currency tied to the dollar is). I'd guess that if China lets their currency float, then in theory the dollar (or the dollar and that other currency) will fall even more, which will make our exports cheaper to the rest of the world and make our imports (including spot market oil) more expensive.