Trade between Countries with different Economic and Social Systems

The discussions between economists at Bursa in 1958 covered a wide range of subjects of which international trade was only one. This made it necessary to limit the time given to an exchange of views on international trade to two sessions and also affected the character of the discussion in other ways. It was natural, for example, to dwell on general issues of principle and to relate those issues to others forming part of the conference agenda rather than to isolate specific trade problems and deal with them exhaustively. Similarly, the fact that the conference was planned to range over so wide a field meant that those taking part had correspondingly wide interests. Although many of the economists present had written fairly extensively on international trade and had first-hand experience of problems of commercial policy, it could not be taken for granted that they were familiar with the special problems under discussion or with the trends that have been in evidence in recent years in the trade between centrally planned economies and the rest of the world. Their knowledge of trade between ‘Western’ or between ‘Eastern’ countries was not necessarily matched by any similar knowledge of trade between the two groups of countries; and what was true of those who might pass as ‘experts’ on commercial policy applied with greater force to those whose main interests lay outside the field of international economics.