Word: tariffs
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Swinging through Asia was Minister of Aviation Peter Thorneycroft. India sends one-third of its exports to Britain, Pakistan one-fifth. Ceylon's tea enters Britain duty-free, but faces a 35% tariff entering the Common Market. Thorneycroft talked for an hour with Nehru, who emerged to note sourly that Britain's entry into the Market "would certainly weaken the Commonwealth." Most Indian businessmen take a more hardheaded view. As India's Economic Times observed: "If the Commonwealth trade preferences which formed the real and tangible advantages of Commonwealth membership did not exist, the Commonwealth itself might...
Commodity prices are not the only problem, says the bank. Major world importers of the hemisphere's commodities -the U.S. (lead, zinc, petroleum) and Western Europe (sugar, beef) in particular-are lending a more sympathetic ear to the protectionist pleas of their own producers, establishing quotas or tightening tariff barriers to favor agriculture and mining at home. The Latin Americans themselves further hamper things by placing restrictive measures on exports in the misguided notion that they are encouraging local processors and manufacturers. Brazil sometimes sets quotas on cotton and sugar exports; Uruguay imposes a 20% surtax on export wool...
Trouble from the South. The act is under the sharpest attack from the protectionists since World War II. Last week 18 Senators joined to co-sponsor a bill, dropped in the hopper by New Hampshire's Republican Styles Bridges, that would oblige the President to accept every tariff-boosting recommendation put forward by the U.S. Tariff Commission. (Presidents Truman and Eisenhower rejected nearly two-thirds of the commission's proposed tariff increases.) Alarmed, New York's Republican Jacob Javits prepared a counterattack urging the Administration to take the initiative in fighting to uphold reciprocal trade...
Paradoxically, the attack on freer trade comes at a time when protectionist sentiment in the business community seems to be declining. Dun's Review, querying 260 corporation presidents, reported that nearly 60% of them firmly oppose tariffs. But protectionists wield increasing political influence. Southern Congressmen who used to be major advocates of free trade have become increasingly protectionist. The cause: the once agrarian South is now more interested in building a tariff shelter over its burgeoning industries than in finding overseas markets for its cotton...
Petersen favors a shift in U.S. emphasis from case-by-case tariff reductions to multilateral deals, through which whole groups of nations (in particular, the six-nation European Common Market) would agree to freer trade. Further, he urges that all industrialized nations jointly lower their tariffs to permit a greater flow of imports from developing nations. The question is whether the Administration can sell such a policy to Congress and to U.S. allies-or if it can shift to any new policy without losing much that has been won in getting reciprocal trade extensions through successive Congresses...