1993-04-07 10:24 DEL
[UK]
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between the main OECD organisation and mainland China would have been regarded as politically taboo by the United States. Similarly it has been able to have contacts with academic institutione in South Africa when the Nordic members of OECD would have looked askance at contacts between the main OECD organisation and South Africa.
4.
The Advisory Board of the Development Centre, which meets only three times a year, is an entirely different body from the Development Assistance Committee. It is Ambassadorial level, and if the Ambassador is unable to attend, I generally represent him. Both the Ambassador and I attended its meeting on 2 April. Having the same composition as the Council Group on Non-Member Economies (CGNME) it is very unlikely it would transgress on the prerogatives of CGNME. Ambassadors know very well where the boundaries between the two bodies, to both of which they belong, lie.
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5. I may inadvertently have sowed confusion by supposing in my letter of 25 March to Paul Ackroyd that the item on the role of the Development Centre in the dialogue with non-member countries on the agenda of the 2 April meeting (for which no advance paper had been circulated) would concentrate on what resources the Centre could devote to assisting the OECD Secretariat in the latter's dialogue with Dynamio Non--Member Economies (DNMEs) and any further expansion of this dialogue which OECD Council/CGNME might later this year decide upon, This was because the Americans last year were pushing for the Centre ́s resources to be reallocated to assist this dialogue. We have been keen to ensure that any involvement by the Centre in dialogue with the DNMES does not diminish the resources the Centre devotes to its main research programme. Hence the conservative line in the suggested points to make which was enclosed with my letter under reference to Paul Ackroyd.
6.
In the event the discussion on the Advisory Board on 2 April focussed almost entirely on the Centre's dialogue with its academic/research counterparts overseas (my separate letter to Paul Ackroyd refers). This dialogue has been going on since 1962 and was explicitly endorsed by the OECD Council when the Centre's role was reformulated in 1971. For example, the Centre's terms of reference aska it "through its contacte with developing countries, .. [to] serve as a forum for an informal dialogue with developing countries, on matters of common interest,
the Centre should pursue this function wherever appropriate." Until the OECD Secretariat's dialogue with Non-Member Economies (DNMES) was established in 1989, the Development Centre was OECD ́s sole window to developing countries. It was dissatisfaction with a dialogue confined largely to research institutions that led the OECD Council in 1989 to approve a more policy related dialogue, conducted via workshops organised by the OECD Secretariat (not the Centre) with a limited number of Dynamic Asian Economies (expanded this year to include some Latin American countries).
7. Any attempts by the UK to curb the Centre's autonomy or to get it to withdraw from its longstanding dialogue with its research counterparts overseas would not win favour from other members of the Centre's Advisory Board; where we exercise at the
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