Alfred Amonn’s review of Ernst Heuss’s Wirtschaftssysteme und internationaler Handel examines how international exchange interacts with the institutions of different economic systems. Its central question is how economies can obtain the benefits of trade while preserving their distinctive domestic arrangements. Amonn presents Heuss’s analysis as important for theory and policy alike:
Das Buch verdient sowohl von Seite der Theoretiker wie von der der Praktiker der Handelspolitik die allerernsteste Beachtung.
English translation: The book deserves the most serious attention on the part of the theorists of commercial policy as well as of its practitioners.
The review proceeds from competitive markets through autonomous monetary policy and monopolized economies to socialist market and planned systems. Across these cases, external adjustment depends on monetary institutions, income distribution, and the organization of production. Trade restrictions consequently appear not merely as isolated interventions but as instruments for sustaining particular economic orders.
The competitive market economy supplies the baseline. Spatial specialization depends on the mobility of goods and productive factors, transport costs, and institutional barriers. With a given money supply, trade imbalances induce changes in nominal income: a deficit reduces domestic purchasing power and import demand while increasing income and demand abroad. Credit arrangements and price movements modify this adjustment. International capital movements similarly entail real transfers mediated through trade, rather than financial transactions alone.
Autonomous monetary policy alters this mechanism because domestic credit creation can offset the income adjustment otherwise associated with an external imbalance. Flexible exchange rates provide another counterweight to rising import demand:
Dieses Gegengewicht besteht darin, dass die erhöhte Nachfrage nach Auslandsgütern zu einer erhöhten Nachfrage nach Devisen und damit zu einer Erhöhung des Wechselkurses und einer Verteuerung der Auslandgüter führt.
English translation: This counterweight consists in the fact that the increased demand for foreign goods leads to an increased demand for foreign exchange and thereby to a rise in the rate of exchange and to a rise in the price of foreign goods.
The argument therefore turns to exchange-rate determination and the responsiveness of trade flows. A formal equilibrium requires scrutiny of the conditions under which adjustment actually occurs:
Es fragt sich dann, «welche Bedingungen» dafür «erfüllt sein müssen» (S. 69), und die weitere Frage ist, wie es damit in der Wirklichkeit bestellt ist, d.h. «mit welcher Elastizität in der Wirklichkeit zu rechnen ist» (S. 70).
English translation: The question then is "which conditions" "must be fulfilled" for this (p. 69), and the further question is how matters stand with this in reality, that is, "what elasticity is to be reckoned with in reality" (p. 70).
The elasticity discussion returns to nominal income and purchasing power as decisive determinants. Flexible rates change the means of adjustment without removing the underlying sources of comparative advantage. Capital movements complicate the policy implications: investment transfers can produce an ill-timed import surplus, while capital flight can transmit depression to the receiving economy. Temporary stabilization or monetary countermeasures may therefore be justified. Nevertheless, autonomous monetary policy combined with fixed exchange rates generates pressure for exchange controls.
In monopolized economies, the principal issue becomes income distribution. Product monopolies may need tariffs to preserve their distributive position, while monopolized labor markets require immigration restrictions. Monopoly across successive production stages encourages accumulating restrictions and contracting output. Commercial policy thus helps maintain domestic arrangements through tariffs and export premiums.
The socialist discussion distinguishes redistribution through markets from collective determination of production. In the socialist market model, average-cost pricing replaces marginal-cost pricing, entrepreneurial differential income disappears, and officials assume entrepreneurial functions. Socializing land prevents distributive gains from reappearing as rents. Goods trade can remain substantially market-coordinated, but labor mobility and entrepreneurial capital transfers threaten the system’s institutional foundations.
Planning replaces individual consumer demands with a central hierarchy of objectives, without abolishing scarcity or the need to economize resources. Foreign trade supports the plan where domestic resources are insufficient or comparatively costly. Imports are assessed through urgency and cost advantages; exports through the relationship between foreign-exchange earnings and productive expenditure. Central authorities perform coordination otherwise undertaken through markets.
The closing problem is institutional asymmetry. A large planned economy negotiates as a unified buyer and seller against dispersed market participants and can exploit this position through price discrimination. Heuss proposes an independent foreign-trade office to negotiate collectively and organize internal procurement and distribution. Amonn’s review thereby connects trade-policy evaluation to the preservation or transformation of economic systems: measures defended as necessary must be tested against the actual institutional conditions they serve.
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