SIGNS OF EXHAUSTION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26352, 6 January 1947, Page 6

SIGNS OF EXHAUSTION

GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY SELF-SUPPORT RETARDED LONDON, Jan. 3. The question whether the level of industry as laid down in the Potsdam Agreement for Germany’s peace-time economy will be maintained is assum,ing increasing says the Berlin correspondent of The Times. Revision is much talked about, and it is generally agreed that any revision will be upward, to enable Germany’s exhausted economy to be restored and provide a means for discharging the heavy reparation demands which will be embodied in the coming peace treaty. The correspondent quotes an American spokesman as saying that, if it should prove that the present level was endangering the success of the new export-import programme designed to make the combined AngloAmerican area self-supporting by the end of 1949, then the British and American Governments would have to fix another. The Potsdam level was based on economic unification of Germany, and that had not yet been achieved. There was still hope that it might be, in which case the Anglo-American plan for making Western Germany selfsupporting would not be. scrapped but fitted into the larger scheme. The plan had been framed with this in mind, and the door was still open.