Finance, Trade and Development: Issues in Transatlantic Cooperation

Despite current economic problems and conflicts - or perhaps as their cause - the concordance of policies among the major industrial countries in the first half of the 1980s in dealing with finance, trade and development is at a peak. This has been the result not so much of cooperation or coordination as of the more-or-less independent adoption of common policies. The policies are similar not because they are imposed by a dominant, hegemonic power or an international institution, nor by imitation, but because governments have chosen similar approaches to their common problems. It is nevertheless possible that the alliance between the United States and Britain has played a significant role in getting others to follow them, through some influence of Britain in the EEC as well as the force of the American example. After a general introduction, the paper considers successively the problem areas of finance, trade and development, focussing throughout on the Anglo-American relationship, but always in the broader context of the international economy.