Finance Ministers Make Progress on Trade Talks

WASHINGTON — Finance ministers from the leading industrial and developing countries moved toward agreement Thursday on the staging of international conferences on monetary reform and trade liberalization as steps toward stimulating world economic growth.

The World Bank’s Development Assistance Committee, made up of U.S. Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III and finance ministers from 21 other countries, discussed the proposed multilateral trade conference and examined an expert report warning that world commerce could stall if protectionism continues to spread.

The United States is seeking such a conference, under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, in hopes of obtaining reductions of trade barriers in Japan, Western Europe and developing countries against U.S. high technology exports and, above all, services such as banking and information processing, which have not been covered by previous rounds of international trade negotiations.

Baker, fearing the rising pressure in Congress for protectionist measures to reduce competition from imports, said Wednesday that the United States is “fully prepared to put current U.S. trade restrictions on the table as part of a new round of trade negotiations, provided others are prepared to do the same.”

This was a major issue discussed in the closed ministerial session, which considered a report prepared by the World Bank staff saying that heavily indebted developing countries would be unable to keep up debt payments and attract the foreign capital needed to finance their growth unless industrial nations’ markets remain open to Third World exports.

In trying to win agreement on a new round of trade talks, the United States has had to offer to hold talks on monetary system reform. The system has been shaken by recent instability of exchange rates as the dollar soared against other major currencies.

Baker said last week that the United States is prepared to host a meeting of major industrial countries later this year to consider recommendations for monetary reform that are being prepared by the Group of 10, which represents the International Monetary Fund’s most developed member nations.

The joint meeting here of the IMF and World Bank’s policy-making committees will end today, when conclusions are to be announced on discussions of cooperative measures to generate economic growth during the rest of this decade.