US PRESIDENT Bill Clinton announced on September 29, a sweeping liberalisation of export controls on computers and other high-technology products. This indicates a change in attitude from 1989, when the US had banned exports of supercomputers to India fearing they would be used for space or atomic research (Down To Earth, October 15, 1993).

In the first phase of liberalisation, exports of computers with a performance capacity of 194 million theoretical operations per second will be decontrolled for all countries except the former eastern bloc, China and a few other destinations. In the second phase, a much broader range of computer equipment, including multiprocessor servers, minicomputers and some mainframe computers, will be decontrolled.