Word: importance
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...steadily broadened its aid program, the free rate has soared as high as 120 kip for $1 in the markets of Vientiane, Bangkok and Hong Kong. The disparity between official and free-exchange rates has become an open invitation to speculators. The system works this way: a Laotian importer wants to bring in 20 radios at a unit cost of $50 each. He gets an import license for $1,000 worth of radios from the Laotian government. He pays for it with $1,000 in Laotian kip, which he has already bought on the free market in Bangkok or Hong...
Often enough the importer does not bother to import the radios-he has them intercepted in Bangkok and sold at still higher profits. Sometimes the radios really reach Laos (marked with the universally recognized symbol of clasped hands in front of a U.S. flag). But before Laos' primitive customs guards can catch up and impose an import tax, the radios are smuggled back across the Mekong River and shipped into Bangkok for sale at handsome profits. Laotian officials, either out of confusion or collusion, have granted orders for some items that seem of questionable utility in a country that...
...that ended in 1955 after increasing national income 17.5%, per capita income 10.5%, industrial output 38%. Then India decided to launch a second. $10 billion expansion plan. But the expected foreign capital was not available, and costs turned out to be grossly underestimated. With the government forced to cut imports to save foreign exchange, food prices have risen 16% in six months. India's neighbor. Pakistan, is not much better off. Once the breadbasket of undivided India, Pakistan had virtually no industry. In the struggle to industrialize, Pakistan raised industrial output 285% between 1950 and 1955. But so much...
...nationalizing properties of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., in expropriating the United Fruit Co. properties by Guatemala, and finally in expropriating the Suez Canal." Abs also cited instances of indirect interferences with the rights of private foreign capital. Among them: the withholding of essential raw materials, the refusal of import licenses and excessive taxation...
Proper Protection. How may foreign private investors be properly protected? Said Abs: "There is only one means apt to implement such protection, and that is an International Convention by which all contracting parties, both typical capital-export and capital-import countries, undertake to treat foreign capital and other foreign interests fairly and without discrimination and to abstain from direct or indirect illegal interferences with such investment...