Summary Report on the Round Tables Relating to the Papers on ‘East-West Trade’

There were some occasions during the Round Tables when participants spoke about East-West trade as if the geographical adjectives had the same meaning as in such phrases as ‘East-West relations’ or ‘East-West tension’. But the occasions were rare, for it cannot have been the intention of the organisers of this Congress that this group of papers and debates should, alone of the other themes of the meeting, deal with a geographical area or a political alliance as such. The concentration of attention in other groups upon the developing countries and upon the European Common Market was surely made because the economic relationships within each differ significantly from those of sovereign, developed market systems — typified by the United States — which all those who teach from Professor Samuelson’s textbook take as the norm. In such a light, the ‘West’ is a non-specific economy with familiar characteristics and the ‘East’ is an entity with a set of distinctive criteria for economic management, commonly termed central planning.