Suchergebnisse

Within the last year or so there have been signs of another attempt to halt the drift toward anarchic restrictionism in international trade. Its origins may be discerned in the conference of British Commonwealth Finance Ministers summoned to London in January 1952 to consider the third of the sterling area's postwar crises. This conference, after branding as "palliatives" the measures taken to remedy recurring balance of payments deficits, concluded that a lasting solution of the sterling area's problems was possible only"when the world-wide trade of the sterling area is on a substantially higher level than at present, when sterling is freely convertible into all the main currencies of the world, and its position need no longer be supported by import restrictions." A year later, another Commonwealth conference reaffirmed these objections in more striking language: "The Commonwealth countries look outward to…co-operation with other countries, not inward to a closed association. It is their common purpose, by their own efforts and together with others, to increase world trade for the benefit of all peoples." The first formal step toward widening the basis of this initiative took place in March of this year, when Mr. Anthony Eden and Mr. R. A. Butler, acting in this matter for the British Commonwealth as a whole, discussed the economic prospect with Mr. John Foster Dulles, and found "reason to hope for continued progress towards a better-balanced, growing world trade and the restoration of a multilateral system of trade and payments." From Washington, Mr. Eden and Mr. Butler went to Paris in fulfillment of a promise to "keep in step with the Organization for European Economic Co-operation."