Trade Among Capitalist Countries

An anatomy of trade among the capitalist states: the rivalry of the United States, Western Europe and Japan, the tariff bargaining of the GATT rounds, the rise of the transnational corporation, and the collision between free-trade rhetoric and protectionist practice across the disordered commerce of the 1970s.

Khvoinik is careful, statistically literate and professionally cautious, and on a great deal of it he is right. The material on the Tokyo Round, on non-tariff barriers, on intra-firm trade within the multinationals, and on the drift back toward protection as the postwar boom ended is solid work drawn from Western official sources and set out to be checked.

He announces his audience with unusual frankness: this is not a textbook but a study addressed to relatively well-informed readers abroad.

He also announces, in one quiet sentence of the preface, the boundary that governs the book - that East-West trade, though one of the major dynamic elements of world economic relations, lies outside its scope. The economist who will measure every current running through the capitalist half of the world market stops precisely where his own half begins.

For once the date is the real one. The evidence runs hard into the early 1980s, the Twenty-Sixth Congress of February 1981 is quoted as a live event, and the book's own summary is that world capitalism is in its third recession of the decade.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.