The Developing Countries Gatt and Unctad

Abstract

When in 1947 the representatives of twenty-seven nations, including the major trading countries of the world, signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) they paid relatively little attention to the special problems of developing countries. It is true that the ill-fated Havana Charter,' envisaging the establishment of the International Trade Organisation (ITO), had included some important articles on the problems of development; in particular the Charter took account of the special trade difficulties of primary producers. But in the immediate aftermath of war, emphasis was upon the economic recovery of countries of established political and economic status rather than upon the needs of those just emerging as political and economic Powers, few of which had attained full political independence. Although the peoples of what we now know as the developing countries were living in appalling poverty, at the time of the institution of the GATT their economic problems did not obtrude themselves as forcibly upon the world as in recent years. In many countries of Western Europe people were too busy feeding and clothing themselves, and rebuilding their homes and factories, to have much interest in the sufferings of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans-who, in any case, had always been desperately poor. Attention was also diverted from the poverty of these people in that, in the earliest postwar years, many primary producing countries enjoyed a period of (for them) relative prosperity. In some poor countries, notably India and Egypt, the stationing of allied troops, together with substantial receipts from sales of war supplies, had resulted in the accumulation of substantial external balances. Generally the balances of payments of such countries were