Word: britain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Warburg Professor of Economics Gottfried Haberler, who handles Harvard's graduate course in International Trade, calls the pound devaluation a "courageous" move and thinks it has a good chance of completely wiping out Britain's dollar deficit by 1952, providing low British incomes don't force general wage rises...
...move's chances of success, Professor Haberler agrees with Professor Williams that Britain's internal welfare program should be less lavish and that her sterling war debt should be repaid less liberally. He also thinks this country sooner or later will have to allow its export volume to drop. "Otherwise we must resign ourselves to subsidizing the world forever...
Despite the optimistic views of his colleagues, something of a minority view was voiced by Seymour e. Harris '20, professor or Economics and head of the undergraduate International Trade course. "Britain will still have a substantial deficit in 1952," he predicted, "largely because the American market won't take much more British goods." Professor Harris says the British deficit is so large that "even if the United States were to double its purchases of British goods, it still would not cover a large part of the deficit...
What intensifies this particular difficulty, Professor Harris believes, is that devaluation in other countries will cut Britain's chances of increasing sales outside of the United States in the Latin American and sterling area markets. "Consequently I'm not overly enthusiastic about devaluation, because there is so much else that must be done...
While most of the University's experts were concerned with the effect of devaluation upon Great Britain and Western Europe, two in the Harvard family were nothing the impact of the British action upon Soviet Russia...