Protection of Investments in Backward Countries

Report Outline
Attacks on American Property Abroad
Capital Needs of Underdeveloped Lands
Efforts to Protect Foreign Investments

Attacks on American Property Abroad

Members of the United Nations joined last December in unanimously proclaiming the current decade as “the United Nations Development Decade, in which member states will intensify their efforts & … to attain in each underdeveloped country a substantial increase in the rate of growth.” A second General Assembly resolution urged member states to give the program a realistic send-off by contributing to the U.N. Special Fund and to the organization's Technical Assistance Program.

The two resolutions, adopted Dec. 19, constituted a response to a proposal advanced by President Kennedy when he addressed the Assembly on Sept. 25. The President called for expansion and coordination of existing U.N. efforts to promote economic growth, so that “development can become a cooperative, not competitive enterprise—to enable all nations & … to become in fact as well as law both free and equal states.”

Conditions for Success of Development Decade

A special report by Acting Secretary General U Thant, made public June 14, outlined various measures which he said would need to be taken to make the Development Decade a success. Thant laid down as the goal to keep in mind an increase in national incomes of underdeveloped countries to a rate of 5 per cent annually by 1970; such a growth rate would represent a 2 per cent annual increase in personal income. At a news conference devoted to the special report, Paul G. Hoffman, former Marshall Plan administrator who now heads the U.N. Special Fund, said that attainment of the goal cited would require about $80 billion of new investment in the underdeveloped nations. He estimated that investment on this scale would add $2 billion a year for the next 10 years to amounts the industrialized nations were currently investing in backward countries.