42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST This type of direct buying has not been repeated in any product. A number of handicraft goods are exported by India—for instance, garments, carpets and sports goods—but foreign buyers do not rush to India when they want to buy handicrafts. The recent boom in cane furniture is a case in point: virtually every flight to south-east Asia carries some Western buyers of cane furniture, but none of them stops in India despite its large production of cane goods. This overflight may have other reasons, but we are inclined to explain it in the same terms as we did the emergence of joint ventures: the Indian system makes an Indian intermediary essential to any intending importer of Indian goods, and the cost of the intermediary is too high in many products. The intermediary is necessary to deal with government procedures, with banks, with communications, all of which can be coped with by an Indian used to them but which quite defeat the uneducated foreigner. What distinguishes Singapore and Hong Kong from India is not the repressive labour laws, but the simplicity of administration, banking and communications which makes them readily accessible to a foreign businessman. Sub-contracting is very common within India, especially in the engineering industry: there are large numbers of Indian buyers, but few foreign ones who would sub-contract in India. India's isolation from the yitemational sub-contracting business is to be explained in terms of the insulation of its banking and communications from the international network. Conclusion At the outset we noted that the distinguishing characteristic of the new forms of investment lay in the sharing of the returns of enterprise. In this sense return-sharing arrangements can be looked upon as recently developed means of extending the market for technological or managerial skills. They have effectively created a market in India for technology through minority joint ventures and licensing arrangements. Turnkey plant construction had a brief vogue and declined in the seventies. The success of these new forms of investment was closely related to the favours bestowed on them by the government, just as the failure of franchises and production-sharing arrangements was due to its disfavour. The only significant exception was sub-contracting, which wilted in India despite government encouragement, and we explained it in terms of the peculiarities of the Indian business environment. This is a factor—or a conceries of factors—which we have cited in the success of minority joint ventures as well. We would now generalize the argument and say that a specific Indian business environment has emerged since independence in which Indian businessmen are more at home and more successful than unschooled foreign entrepreneurs. Government policy is one of the forces that has shaped this environment, but it is not the only one : there are certain features of the Indian environment, such as the large regional variations, the functioning of the labour market, the paucity of