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United States Economic Foreign Policy: Research Requirements for 1965
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
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The last several decades have each been broadly characterized by one or two central economic questions. In the 1920's the central problem was international capital transfers, or reparations and war debts; in the 1930's, the international spread of unemployment and destabilizing speculation; in the late 1940's, after the war, reconstruction; in the 1950's, defense economics and growth.
Not only can we identify them; it is on the whole fair to say that the central problems of the 1920's, 1930's, and 1940's have been solved. International capital transfer is accomplished by preventing war debts from accumulating, paying limited reparations in kind, and furnishing the capital needed for reconstruction, and in part for economic growth, as grants or on liberal loan terms.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1959
References
1 CED, In, Problems of United States Economic Development, Vol. 1, New York, 1958, pp. 27–32.Google Scholar
2 See especially Elliott, W. Y., ed., A Foreign Economic Policy for the United States, New York, 1955Google Scholar; and Panel 111, Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Foreign Economic Policy for the Twentieth Century, New York, 1958.Google Scholar
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4 See the work of the FAO Committee on Commodity Problems, including the Commodity Policy Studies.
5 See Food Research Institute of Stanford University, “Publications, 1946–1948,” Stanford, Calif., April 1948.
6 See the annual review of the UN Secretariat on International Commodity Arrangements, now succeeded by the reports of the Commodity Commission.
7 Princeton, N.J., 1945.
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14 See the foreword to General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Trends in International Trade, A Report by a Panel of Experts, Geneva, October 1958.
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16 It should be noted that the National Planning Association was enabled to undertake research into particular foreign investment activities only on the condition that it avoid discussion of the rate of profit. This is Hamlet without the Prince. Other important work in the area which should be mentioned is going forward in the Harvard Law School's International Project, and in the Columbia School of Business Administration's International Business Project on Joint Ventures. A useful addition to the literature is the set of Hearings on Private Foreign Investment before the Subcommittee on Economic Foreign Policy of the House Ways and Means Committee in December 1958.
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18 For example, how is the capacity to absorb capital affected by the form taken by the goods imported under the loan; and where, if one were trying to saturate countries with all the capital mey could absorb, would one draw the line between the rapidly growing country which cannot be said to “need” the capital, even though it could use it, and the stagnant or slowly growing countries which need it but cannot use it? In this connection there is a very real problem of dividing aid, whether loans or grants, among countries engaged on developmental programs. I gravely doubt whether objective economic criteria can alter die essentially political character of die process.
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