The strengthening of the economic forces which link together the economies of different countries has been a remarkable feature of the postwar years. The main contributing factor has been the rapid increase in international trade. This has been reinforced by the resurgence of international capital flows, tied to the growth of international corporations and to the birth of the Eurobonds market. Another characteristic of recent years is that contacts between policy makers of different countries have become much more frequent than in the past, among other things because of the striking development of international organizations.

This study has three main objectives. The first is to provide a framework for analyzing the internal monetary effects of surpluses and deficits in the balance of a country's international payments. In published models of the foreign exchange markets, both theoretical and empirical, there typically is no link between the determination of exchange rates, on the one hand, and interest rates on the other. Yet, capital movements are described and estimated, in these models, as determined by the joint influence of such variables. This missing link might very well go far toward explaining the weak statistical results that are generally obtained in these models, especially with regard to the sensitivity of capital movements to exchange rates or to covered interest rate differentials. Even in the economy-wide models that have been constructed and estimated for various countries in recent years, the channels through which external surpluses (deficits) inject (absorb) liquidity into (from) the economy is not clarified in a detail sufficient for the analysis of the connections between foreign exchange policy and monetary policy.

The comprehensive and allround economic reform currently under way in the Soviet Union embraces all the sectors of the national economy - industry, construction, farming, transport, trade, science, etc.: it extends to all levels in the organizational structure of the management of social production - work-shops, enterprises, associations, industrial chief administrations, and ministries. The reform is bringing many changes to the traditional forms and methods of activity of the central planning, economic and financial-credit agencies of the state.

The socialist enterprises have been now endowed with wide rights in managing the economic resourses, regulating their interrelations with the raw material suppliers and the consumers of the finished products. In this connection, the question sometimes is voiced in the foreign press: is not the economic reform currently under way in the Soviet Union a renouncement of the basic principles of socialist production management, does it not herald a weakness of the planned nature of the Soviet economy?

L'élévation des salaires réels dans les pays capitalistes avancés au cours du 20e siècle est un fait incontestable. Cette tendance soutenue a permis l'avènement, après la seconde guerre mondiale, de “sociétés de consommation”. Non moins contestable, semble-t-il, est le sentiment diffus d'insatisfaction qui règne dans ces sociétés en dépit de la hausse du niveau de vie moyen. C'est comme si - paraphrasant Malthus - les besoins s'accroissaient en progression “géométrique”, et les moyens de les satisfaire en progression “arithmétique” seulement.

S'agit-il là d'un phénomène fortuit et passager ? Le problème n'est-il pas simplement d'ordre psychologique ? Nous limitant au cadre des pays capitalistes avancés, nous tenterons de montrer que l'insatisfaction notée repose sur une base objective réelle et stable, le développement même du capitalisme monopoliste impliquant un écart croissant entre ressources et besoins.