WORLD TRADE IN MOTOR VEHICLES

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 121, 16 February 1937, Page 8

WORLD TRADE IN MOTOR VEHICLES

Of every twenty motor-vehicles entering world trade, nine go to countries in the British. Commonwealth. . . . New Zealand has (or had in 1935: she has more now) one motor-vehicle to every eight persons. Only the United States (one to every five persons) enjoyed a greater density. New Zealand has more motor-vehicles than Belgium: Australia more than Italy; Canada more than Germany. . . . The two outstanding markets for the motor exporter are Australia and South Africa, which together absorb nearly a quarter of the total world export. . . . The United Kingdom is second to the United States as a motor-vehicle manufacturer, but the American output is ten times the British. ... In the United States there are nine million more motor-vehicles than telephones. These items of information, picked at random, indicate the spread of the latest published report of the Imperial Economic Committee: A Survey of the Trade in Motor Vehicles (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office). Although statistical information is issued periodically in each of the motor manufacturing countries, no such comprehensive review of the world trade has hitherto been made available. The investigations, of the Imperial Economic Committee have been concerned principally with primary production, but there are precedents' for the present report (the thirtieth) in the eleventh, fourteenth and . twenty-ninth—surveys of world trade in agricultural machinery, rubber manufactured goods, and electrical machinery and apparatus. After all, the farming, mining and timber-milling or lumbering of the Empire are but one side of its economic activities; and although manufacturing usually has been, and is, better equipped to do its own market research than are the primary industries, the Imperial importance of such a trade as that in motor-vehicles warrants attention. The period covered in the survey is from 1929 to 1935, and the preliminary review of the trade generally is ‘ followed by a detailed examination of the Empire market, and an account of the industry in each of the six principal exporting countries —after the United States and the United Kingdom come Canada, France, Germany, and Italy. A short account is given, too, of the developments in Russia and fa pan.