The New Nation - Internet Edition

Reuters, Mumbai

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Monday urged India to accelerate reforms to open up its economy and said China needed to move more quickly towards a market-determined currency. Paulson said India was mostly on the right path to modernise its financial sector, with a flexible currency, but China, with its tightly controlled yuan exchange rate, was increasingly the focus of protectionist sentiment around the world. "Very often around the world, if someone doesn't like globalization, the face they put on it is the face of China," the U.S. treasury secretary told an infrastructure conference in India's burgeoning financial capital. Paulson said China needed to allow the yuan to rise more in the near term to reflect the strong fundamentals of an economy that data last week showed expanded in the third quarter by 11.5 percent over a year earlier.