Suchergebnisse

Concern about competitiveness in high technology has induced the European countries to pursue a policy of accelerated modernization. Raising the level of investment has become first priority, which implies reduced individual and social consumption and a distributive bias in favor of capital at the expense of wages, government revenues, and externalities, or environment. In addition, labor-saving innovations in process technology are speeded up without demand for final products being allowed to rise proportionally. The policy model is therefore bound to tolerate mass unemployment. Worldwide, the neomercantilist strategy creates large-scale overcapacity and leads to a race of competitive downward adjustments vis-à-vis increasing low-cost competition. The preferable alternative for Europe is a combination of Continent-wide free trade and controlled external trade in order to achieve both industrial modernization and economic growth.

Historical context of US-European trade relations.

THE 1960s APPEAR IN RETROSPECT AS THE BELLE ÉPOQUE of the postwar era. The IMF— a Cinderella while convertibility remained limited to the EPU-area—came into its own, as did the GATT with the Dillon and Kennedy Rounds. There were plenty of storm clouds, however. The monetary system, for one, was built on the shakiest of foundations. The gold/dollar parity had been fixed by an Act of Congress at $35 in 1933, a quarter century before convertibility became a reality. Four years after convertibility, in 1962, the gold pool had to be set up: a massive commodity agreement between the six richest countries, with the Bank of England as the buffer stock manager. That agreement limped on to the mid-1960s by the grace of the Russians, whose bad harvests forced them into substantial gold sales. After that, the combined effects of American arm twisting and the hubris of highly dirigiste central bankers shored up the system, until its final collapse in 1971.

Translated from the English by Tomás Segovia.