Protectionism and Indian IT industry

Abstract

Advanced economies, today, are in a recession and face high unemployment. Several jobs have been outsourced and offshored to India, China and other emerging economies. While it helps in cost cutting, people in the advanced economies have become structurally unemployed. Brexit, and emergence of Donald Trump are just two of the instances of the developed economies turning protectionist. Protectionism was one of the major agendas at the World Economic Forum in 2017, with the developed nations favouring it and the emerging nations against it. The IT industry has been in the eye of this storm. India, it is believed, skipped industrialisation and jumped straight to knowledge building and service industry. The IT industry was born out of this and has been looked at the panacea for India’s concerns of growth, foreign exchange and employment. Therefore, there are growing concerns over the effect of protectionism on the IT Industry and subsequently the consequences on the Indian economy. In our study, we have tried to understand the probable impacts of such developments on the IT and IT enabled industry in India, and the possible future avenues for them.