Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Communist bloc's economic news was pretty bad last week, even by Communist standards. There was the Soviet Union, admitting that its industrial production has not risen as fast as planned (see THE WORLD). In Cuba, where the economy has tumbled to 80% of pre-Castro levels, the government moved to halt the decline by making President Osvaldo Dorticós economics minister and central planning board chairman. That was not all. Communist China's economy has produced more bad news than goods, and Russia's growing difficulties with Rumania are largely the result of its efforts...
Trimming the Bureaucracy. Post-Stalin liberalism in the bloc is bringing self-criticism and some slow improvement. The Czech government is turning back to private ownership in such small enterprises as tailor shops, laundries and hat-check concessions. To provide more laborers, it is also trimming a bureaucracy swollen to 750,000 unproductive clerks and minor officials. To get hard currency for grain and machinery imports, it is wooing Western tourists with film and jazz festivals and easy visas. Last week, in one of the biggest policy decisions so far, State Planning Commission Chairman Oldrich Cernik announced that factories that...
Nonetheless, an agreement permits citizens of the Nordic bloc to live, work, pay taxes and draw welfare benefits anywhere in Scandinavia (including Iceland, which won its independence from Denmark in 1944, Danish-ruled Greenland and the semiautonomous Faroe Islands), and today they virtually have common citizenship. They are linked by similar parliamentary systems, laws, education, a Lutheran background, their hunger for books and food, the absence of class, race or religious frictions or of governmental corruption. A passion for exercise explains the firm figures, clear eyes and radiant complexions of their beautiful women...
...Scandinavia's royal families have played an influential part in the north's emergence from the traditional isolationism that ended with World War II. Since then, Norway and Denmark have bound themselves to Europe as charter members of NATO and EFTA, the Outer Seven trading bloc. Finland, Russia's only European neighbor that has not been plucked behind the Iron Curtain, has meticulously observed the neutrality agreement imposed on its government by Moscow after its valiant defense against the Red army. Nonetheless, the Finns are also associated with EFTA and have strong economic and emotional ties...
...hours. For three months at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, 75 underdeveloped nations squared off against 29 industrialized nations, which had been shotgunned into the meeting in the first place. At issue was how to improve the poorer nations' dwindling share of world trade. The underdeveloped bloc came up with a list of extravagant demands that would boggle even a sultan: preferential tariff treatment for their manufactured goods, abolition of all barriers against their raw material exports, high fixed commodity prices. Predictably, the wealthy nations...