2 -
I find it very depressing, when I have tried for
so long to minimise the damage that disagreement could do to relations between the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, that these negotiations should have done so much damage that seems to me unnecessary.
I have just been reading Vincent Cable's piece
in ODI Review no. 2 1977 "British Protectionism and LDC Imports", in which he concludes that in the clothing sector, "notional productivity growth emerges clearly as the most potent cause of employment displacement"; and that in footwear and cotton fabrics, while imports have been the major influence (on employment), "the major growth of imports has been from developed countries or Comecon and not from 1dcs". In textile yarn production the major cause has been falling consumption. So that "job loss annually from 1dc import competition (less exports to ldcs) is little more than 1.5-2% in the worst case, clothing, 0.8% for cotton fabrics, 0.4% for footwear, and negligible for textile yarn.
His final sentence says, "the reactions of producers and of the Government to the imagined 'threat' of ldc imports are quite disproportionate to its actual size or potential".
So the cure seems largely irrelevant to the disease. We can only hope that in five years time the same people won't be proposing even larger doses of the same medicine (though that has of course been the practice since 1959).
And
а
Happy
New Year to
you.
ever
Land
(D.H. Jordan)
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