IMPERIAL ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 146, 17 March 1934, Page 6

IMPERIAL ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION

Sir James Parr has allied himself with Mr. Stanley Bruce, his Australian colleague, by urging closer Imperial co-operation in economic affairs. They are supported by Mr. Walter Elliot, British Minister of Agriculture and the driving force of the “new deal” in agricultural marketing at Home. “The States of the British Commonwealth of Nations,” said he in' a recent speech, “have many economic problems in common. The need of some standing organisation to examine these problems has been repeatedly felt.” And the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, Mr. J. H. Thomas, in one of his cablegrams to the New Zealand Government on the planned marketing of dairy produce, followed the same line.—“No plan would be complete which did not provide for proper consultation and liaison between Dominion Governments and the Government of the United Kingdom.”

It is odd, but perhaps not insignificant, that this sudden display of Imperial brotherhood should come within six months after the abolition of the Empire Marketing Board, which was the most important outcome of the establishment of the Imperial Economic Committee in 1925. That committee itself was designed to do very much what Sir James Parr seemed, to have had in mind when he spoke at Bradford on Thursday. It is still functioning to the extent of "compiling market intelligence notes and making surveys of world production and trade. Through the Empire Marketing Board it undoubtedly did much to help Dominion primary producers; but a disproportionate part of the cost had to be borne by the British taxpayer, which circumstance, taken in conjunction with the Dominions’ wish to make their future publicity more individual and direct, led to the board’s abolition in September last. The first requisite of any plan to establish a standing Imperial Economic Council will be that the Dominions shoulder an adequate share of the cost.