EXTERNAL IMPACT ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT.

Abstract

SUMMARY This lecture on some problems araising from the international economic relations of developing countries, delivered in a developing country aims at giving a concise compendium of the principal propositions and findings of recent international trade theory. Particular emphasis is lied on the importance of pulling together commercial policy, foreign exchange policy and fiscal policy (internal taxes and subsidies) in a comprehensive scheme which was qualified by HarryH. Bell, Research Director of the UNCTAD, as a ‘unified theory of protection’. In fact, the author, who is working in the praxis of international monetary and financial questions but likes personally to make ‘excursions’ to international trade theory and public finance, felt compelled to break down the artificial compartmentalization between the various sub-disciplines of political economy. A first attempt of this kind necessarily cannot go down into all details and necessarily rests to be completed. On this conceptual background the paper deals with the influence of inflation on development, fixed versus floating rates, tariff arguments, the attempt to construct a scientific tariff, the costs of selfsufficiency, the combined net effective rate of protection, quantitative restrictions and monetary trade biasing, the question whether import restriction or export promotion, invisibles in a unified theory of protection, capital movements and multiple exchange rates, the influence of the taxation system on relative prices and exchanges and last but not least the skeleton of a typical reform program. Admittedly, in praxis there will be as long difficulties concerning the application of the projected scientific system of protection as long as no one seems to have elaborated a satisfying empirical method in which tariffs, exchange rates and fiscal instruments are all expressed in terms of comparable units on a comparable scale. But does this matter? Praxis will follow theory.