The Economic-Geographic Basis for Soviet-American Economic Cooperation

Abstract

AbstractEconomic cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States would seem to be favored by several aspects of economic geography, including large dimensions, populations and economic potential of the two countries, a certain complementarity of the resource base, the differences between coastal and inland regions in the two countries, and particularly their mutual economic-geographic situation. Distances between the two countries tend to be of the same order of magnitude, and in some cases shorter, than distances between the extreme western and eastern regions within each country. Active interchange is made possible on a broad front across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Advances in transportation technology may facilitate very long-distance hauls of bulk commodities from Soviet inland resource centers across oceans to inland localities in the United States. The proximity of the two countries in the Bering Strait area may assume significance over the long term as the region is further devel...