March 22, 1992

RisinG exports have been one of the few economic success stories for America in the past several years, a sign of "growing U.S. competitiveness in world markets," as Commerce Secretary Barbara H. Franklin put it last week. But now the exports are shrinking, and that fact may endanger the economic recovery. In January, the Commerce Department reported last week, exports fell for the third straight month, largely because of a fall in shipments of capital equipment used by businesses abroad. The problem does not seem to be American competitiveness, although the stronger dollar is not helping. Foreign economies simply are buying less as they experience their own weakness.

PATRICK WHITE A Life. By David Marr. Illustrated. 727 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

ON the face of it, a vote in the Assembly last week represented a major victory for thousands of New Jersey residents who have struggled for years to keep developers off watershed lands. The Assembly voted unanimously to extend a 1988 moratorium on development of land considered necessary to protect the public water supply. But for the loosely knit coalition of homeowners and environmentalists that has opposed efforts of water companies to develop their watershed properties, the Assembly decision caused no great celebration. The moratorium does not cover previously approved development sites, and it allows for exemptions that companies have already used to their advantage.

As afternoon's fading light sweeps shadows across his bed, Hector Santiago, also known as state inmate 90A3742, runs a bony finger across photographs of his two daughters, captured in the various poses of childhood: birthday parties, trips to the park, a graduation. Then he waits for death. He has not seen the girls, ages 3 and 13, since entering prison in 1990 on a drug-possession conviction, and like any proud father, he longs to be with them. But Mr. Santiago, who is from East Harlem, has two years before parole, and an intractable opponent -- AIDS -- seems to be catching him in the race to freedom.

FOR almost half a century, rent regulation, which has provided virtual lifetime guarantees of inexpensive or below-market-price apartments to hundreds of thousands of families, regardless of means, has been politically untouchable in New York City. In the last year, though, a rising vacancy rate, the city's urgent need for more tax revenues and studies projecting that deregulation would have a limited impact on most apartment residents have brought hope to landlords and fear to tenants that the controversial system will soon be reconsidered, if not revamped.