Point Four, Dollar Gap, and Full Employment
Abstract
Point Four, Dollar Gap, and Full Employment SAGE Publications, Inc.1950DOI: 10.1177/000271625027000103 John H.G.Pierson Department of Labor as chief of the Postwar Labor Problems Division * The views expressed in this article are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of the Eco nomic Cooperation Administration or any other agency. WHEN in the future some historian takes time to plot the many different roads leading to Point Four, he will undoubtedly find much to interest him in the first session of the Preparatory Committee of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment which took place in London in the autumn of 1946. This meeting was in many respects extraordinary. The economies of the eighteen geographically scattered nations represented on the Committee were widely dissimilar. Their interests, therefore, and, indeed, their practical necessities illustrated most of the theoretically possible combinations. A great effort was made to harmonize these differing points of view in a constructive manner. The range of the effort was enormous. Measured by the number and importance of the general principles at stake, not to speak of the complexity of the attendant detail, it is doubtful whether there had ever been an