ABSTRACT
The policy prescriptions which follow from structuralist analyses of international trade cluster around the central issue of finding ways of intervening in markets that will improve the terms on which poor countries trade, as compensation for the structural disadvantages which they suffer in international exchange. The proposals currently being put forward by UNCTAD and being discussed in the continuing North-South dialogue on a new international economic order consist of a scheme for a Common Fund to finance price stabilisation of ten core primary commodities and eight others; agreeing a code of conduct for multinational companies operating in poor countries (including such matters as the transfer of technology); securing reductions in tariff and non-tariff barriers to poor countries’ exports on a non-reciprocal basis, rather than by the agreed mutual reductions under the aegis of GATT; and increasing the volume of international finance available to mitigate the effects of balance-of-payments crises in poor countries.
