SHRINKING U.S. EXPORTS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17957, 8 December 1932, Page 2

SHRINKING U.S. EXPORTS

ECONOMISTS PETITION HOOVER “REMOVE THE TARIFF INEQUALITIES” NEW YORK, Oct. 18. The alarming shrinkage in American exports is attributed directly to the effects of the “Chinese wmll of exclusion.” Several hundred leading economists who take this view have petitioned President Hoover to remove the “inequalities” of the Tariff Law which have aroused foreign retaliation. The majority of the signatories are professors of economics or political economy in universities who in 1930 asked the President to veto the Tariff Bill, which was then nearing the final vote in Congress. According to their present petition their predictions of lost foreign trade and depression at home as a result of the tariff have come true.

Foreign trade, which in 1920 exceeded ■ £1,000,000,000, declined in 1931 to less than £500,000,000, while the exports so far this year are £100,000,000 below those of the corresponding period of last year. BRITAIN kS FRANKNESS Britain, the petition says, adopted a tariff frankly designed to meet the American tariff rates, and the recent conference at Ottawa “furnished living proof that the United States cannot impose embargoes against products of our best customers without harmful reprisals against American goods.” The petition points out that since the Tariff Law was enacted only one reduction a month had been made in excessive rates out of thousands of possible ones. President Hoover is asked in the present crisis to take action under the liexitile provisions of the law so to eliminate all inequalities causing retaliation abroad.