Josef Herbert Fürth: Review of Willi Graf’s Der Aussenhandel zwischen marktwirtschaftlich organisierten und zentralgeleiteten Volkswirtschaften (1952)

Josef Herbert Fürth reviews Willi Graf’s doctoral dissertation on foreign trade between market economies and centrally controlled economies. His judgment combines recognition of its comprehensive coverage with criticism of its analytical omissions. The subject is theoretically and practically important, but theoretical competence alone does not ensure that an author identifies the most revealing problems. Fürth’s central concern is how trade arrangements actually function within different economic systems, especially when political changes disturb established plans.

The review first outlines the dissertation’s progression: Graf distinguishes the two economic systems, surveys the foreign-trade problems associated with central controls, examines the Havana Charter, and considers economic policy, particularly commercial relations between Switzerland and the Soviet area. Fürth praises his command of pure and applied theory and his familiarity with American and European scholarship, while identifying A. O. Hirschman’s National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade as a significant omission. He then qualifies this favorable assessment:

The dissertation contains little that is wrong but (like so many of its kind) equally little that is strikingly original, and the author sometimes seems to miss the most interesting point of the subject under discussion.

The distinction between correctness and insight organizes the examples that follow. Graf observes that Cominform countries used trade policy to strangle Yugoslavia’s economy after Tito’s break with them. Fürth, however, emphasizes the interval between the change in Soviet politics and the subsequent change in Soviet trade policy. That delay could furnish evidence about how long a centrally controlled economy requires to revise its foreign-trade plans. Political conflict thus offers an opportunity to investigate the administrative responsiveness of planning, rather than merely to document economic coercion.

A second criticism concerns the interpretation of economic categories:

It is also true that the differences in cost accounting between Communist and non-Communist countries may create substantial difficulties in foreign trade (pp. 129 ff.); but the author dismisses the Communist position on cost accounting as a mere "falsification" of the non-Communist concept instead of explaining it as a meaningful part of an operating economic system.

Fürth asks for an explanation of Communist accounting within the system it serves, rather than its dismissal through comparison with non-Communist conventions. The methodological point is substantial: differences between economic systems must be understood operationally if their consequences for international exchange are to be explained.

His remaining objections complicate a simple opposition between Communist planning and market economies. Soviet refusal to sign the Havana Charter does not exhaust the institutional picture: Czechoslovakia remained among the contracting parties of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which incorporated much of the Charter’s economic philosophy. Graf also leaves unexplored the comparison between fully controlled and partly controlled economies, including the United Kingdom, and the effects of the Cold War on countries professing adherence to market principles.

Fürth closes by recommending the dissertation despite these omissions. Its value lies in the breadth of its treatment; the review’s distinctive contribution lies in identifying the comparative and institutional questions that breadth leaves unresolved.