Word: mfn
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...problem may soon lead to some difficult negotiations over East-West trade. At issue is most-favored-nation status (MFN), whereby a foreign country is able to export goods to the U.S. at much lower tariff rates. Actually, MFN is a misnomer, since over 95% of the U.S.'s trading partners enjoy that status. Only a handful of Communist countries, including China and the Soviet Union, face discriminatory tariffs that in some cases are double. The Soviet Union is barred from MFN by the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 trade bill, which links commercial opportunities for Communist governments...
Both Moscow and Peking want MFN, along with U.S. export credits, in order to have freer access to American markets and to attract American investment. MFN could increase Soviet-American trade by an estimated 10%, and Sino-American trade still more. U.S. business generally supports trade preferences for both the Soviet Union and China, but Capitol Hill is in no mood to do Moscow any favors, given what many legislators see as Soviet mischief-making in Africa, the Middle East and Indochina. As for human rights, the number of people being allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union...
...chief White House adviser on foreign economic policy, asked Congress temporarily to drop trade legislation that would grant the Russians most-favored-nation status. The move for delay was partly a face-saving gesture, both for the Administration and Moscow. A Senate amendment sponsored by Senator Henry Jackson, tying MFN to free emigration from the Soviet Union, had seemed embarrassingly certain of passage...
...week's end, that view was challenged by Sakharov himself. In an extraordinary open letter to Congress, he urged passage of an amendment proposed by Senator Henry M. Jackson that would make MFN status for Russia contingent upon free emigration. Sakharov argued that the amendment should be a "minimum" condition for detente; if it is not passed, he added, the result will be "a strengthening of repression on ideological grounds...
...upon the relationships between the scientific communities of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and could vitiate our recent effort toward increasing scientific interchange and cooperation." In the opinion of one ranking U.S. Sovietologist, "The impact of the U.S. academy's position could be greater than the withholding of MFN. The whole Soviet scientific community could be put in purgatory and much-sought-after technological breakthroughs will be limited...