Emil Lederer’s conference discussion contribution examines whether Germany’s foreign trade must be understood through rigid constraints or through possibilities for adjustment. Responding to discussions of industrial production and its potential expansion, he challenges the predominance of pessimism. His central contention is that assessments of Germany’s import requirements and export prospects become misleading when they treat domestic needs as unavoidable but foreign demand as largely fixed. Industrialization abroad may change both the urgency of demand for German products and the scale of the world market.
Lederer first reconstructs the pessimistic position. Imports are considered necessary and therefore resistant to reduction; exports supposedly cannot expand without price cuts that would themselves entail losses. Changes in production involve substantial risks, take time, and may be overtaken by further technical or market developments. He does not deny these difficulties. Rather, he questions the evidentiary imbalance of the discussion: restrictive claims have generally been advanced without detailed supporting data, whereas Director Lange has provided a concrete account of an industry repeatedly exploiting changes in its export and production opportunities.
Aus den Ausführungen des Herrn Lange geht meines Erachtens klar die Einseitigkeit des Standpunktes hervor, der immer nur die Hemmnisse des Exports unterstreicht, hingegen die Importe als zwangsläufig gegeben annimmt.
English translation: In my view, Mr. Lange’s remarks clearly reveal the one-sidedness of the standpoint that always stresses only the obstacles to exports, while taking imports as inevitably given.
The objection is methodological as well as practical. Lederer reverses the national viewpoint from which trade constraints have been described. If Germany “needs” its imports, its trading partners also need what they import; conversely, their exports encounter competition just as Germany’s do. Import necessity and export difficulty cannot consistently be assigned to opposite sides of the same exchange. This reversal does not establish that every German export can find a buyer, but it exposes the asymmetry of an argument that recognizes compelling demand only at home.
Lange’s figures on machinery consumption give this criticism a developmental dimension. Very low machinery imports per person in India and China indicate, for Lederer, a substantial potential market, conditional on the development of those economies. Working within the reasoning of the balance-of-payments theorists he addresses, he argues that machinery demand must emerge if such development is to occur. The necessity of imports therefore depends on an economy’s situation and trajectory, not simply on whether the imported goods directly sustain subsistence.
Die ökonomische Situation eines Landes kann den Maschinenkonsum dringlicher machen als den Getreidekonsum (vgl. den gegenwärtigen Zustand Rußlands).
English translation: A country’s economic situation can make the consumption of machinery more urgent than the consumption of grain (compare Russia’s present condition).
This comparison challenges a hierarchy of needs inherited from the years of shortage: grain should not automatically count as indispensable while machinery counts as dispensable. Productive equipment can acquire exceptional urgency within a process of economic transformation. Russia serves as Lederer’s brief contemporary example; the contribution does not develop a separate analysis of its economy.
Durch die Beschleunigung des Industrialisierungsprozesses ist in den letzten Jahren der Weltmarkt wieder sehr elastisch geworden.
English translation: Through the acceleration of the industrialization process, the world market has again become very elastic in recent years.
Elasticity here means responsiveness to changing industrial structures and expanding productive requirements, rather than a numerical estimate of price sensitivity. Lederer concludes with a qualified prospect: rising world industrial production might alter market conditions within a few years enough to make present anxieties appear less alarming. He offers neither a quantified forecast nor a detailed adjustment programme. The contribution’s significance lies in redirecting the discussion from a static inventory of national constraints toward the evolving international demand that could make German export expansion possible.
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