The World Trading System At Risk
Strong views expressed in strong language mark this all-out defense of GATT. Bhagwati of Columbia University rebuts GATT criticisms based on concepts of unfair competition and managed trade, and condemns the aggressive unilateralism of recent American legislation. He has some forward-looking suggestions of how regional arrangements might be fitted into GATT. Coming from one of the leading specialists, this is a major addition to the continuing debate about trade policy going on in many countries.
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"The Bretton Woods system is dead." How often has that remark been made in the last year? Like most clichés, it blends truth and error and the problem is to know in what proportion. The ending of the dollar's convertibility into gold and its devaluation can certainly be taken to mark the end of the monetary system with which we have lived for most of the postwar period. But only some parts of that system worked as envisaged at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Other key attributes developed quite differently. Whatever monetary system comes next-perhaps it will bear the name of Nairobi where the International Monetary Fund meets in the fall of 1973- will certainly alter some of the Bretton Woods rules and practices but may also have some features closer to the original design than to the dollar standard of the past decades.
Unless there is new legislation, the President will, at midnight on June 30, 1967, lose his power to cut American tariffs in trade bargains with other countries. The situation is familiar enough. Eleven times already the country has faced the question of renewing the grant of power first made in the Trade Agreements Act of 1934. Each time, Congress has prolonged the power, sometimes enlarging and sometimes reducing it. Mixing long-run policy and short-run tactics to get the best possible terms for the renewal of trade legislation is an old art in Washington. But this renewal is different.
The 1930s deserve their bad reputation. Unemployment, misery, for many people hunger and, for more, the lack of hope, went with all the other ills of the Great Depression. Then Hitler came to power and fascism around the world grew stronger. The invasions of China by Japan and Ethiopia by Italy, and the Franco rebellion in Spain that soon came to be seen as a kind of global civil war--all showed the way the world was going. Driven by economic pressures, the policies of democratic countries became more narrowly nationalistic; bilateral and preferential trade agreements increased and France, Britain and Holland did what they could to assert privileged positions in their colonies. Although the Soviet Union was hardly a worker's paradise, the very fact that it offered an alternative to collapsed capitalism stirred people's interest and the Kremlin had new cards to play with. The worried democracies, meanwhile, did little to check the rising strength of fascism and were led to make one concession after another. If the times had any redeeming feature, it was that they made people think.

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