Economic Recovery: Hope or Opportunity?

BY THE mid-1980s, after more than a decade of slow growth in the world economy, governments of the major trading countries were generally agreed that what is required to help promote a sustained, which is to say a non-inflationary, recovery in economic activity and to help overcome the debt crisis in the Third World is a concerted effort to counter protectionist trends by setting about the further liberalization of international trade. It was widely acknowledged, too, that a concerted effort is required to repair the international trading system whose norms, rules and procedures are laid down in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). But all that is easier said than done.