§ Now I come to our work in the field of co-operation with the other countries who are members of O.E.E.C. The Convention lays down that the first and most urgent task of the Organisation is the elimination of the dollar gap. During the past year we have sought to give the lead in O.E.E.C. in securing the adoption of policies by the participating countries which were, in our view, best calculated to bring about the most rapid elimination of the need for dollar aid. I have already given the House, on a number of occasions, accounts of these proceedings in Paris, and I pointed out, on the last occasion, that the interim Report to the E.C.A. on the Four-Year Programmes disclosed many great and urgent tasks waiting to be performed by the participating countries, if they were to achieve the objective on which all are agreed—that is independence of extraordinary dollar aid by 1952.
§ Since then, I have spent some time in Paris on two occasions, first for the setting up of the President's Consultative Group, and thereafter for its first full meeting. This Group, which is composed of senior Cabinet Ministers from the countries represented on the Executive Committee, meets either without, or with very few, 2066 officials present, and its meetings are conducted in private and in confidence, so that full and frank discussion can take place. I hope this may prove a successful experiment, and enable the Organisation to plan and instigate that action in the individual countries by which alone effective co-operation between them can be achieved. We have made our view clear that action now taken, or not taken, must vitally affect the recovery of Western Europe, and its ability to achieve its economic independence. There is no magic formula which can take the place of hard work and disciplined action, and it is to this hard, and perhaps sometimes unpleasant, task that the participating countries must now go forward in co-operation.
§ There is one final aspect of our own external economic affairs that I must mention, that is the surpluses which we are currently earning in our trade with certain other countries. Obviously, if we are in overall balance, but are at the same time running a large dollar deficit, we must be in surplus with some other parts of the world. We cannot, of course, even if we wished to, solve this problem by the easy transfer of either exports or currencies.
§ As the 1949 Survey explains, these surpluses are, to a large extent, planned surpluses, in that they arise from the aid which we are granting other O.E.E.C. countries, from overseas investment which is essential to the development of the resources of our overseas territories, or from a moderate drawing down of sterling balances accumulated during and after the war, which are now being used to develop new world resources of raw materials and foodstuffs. All this means that we are, in fact, making a very considerable contribution to the increase of world supplies and the recovery of other countries, which will redound to our own advantage, as to that of the rest of the world, in the years that lie ahead.