THE VENICE SUMMIT : Analysis : Economic Cooperation Only a Goal : Leaders Can’t Agree on New Moves to Help Ease Strains

For all their talk about economic cooperation and consensus, the summit leaders here have not been able to agree on any new moves to ease current strains in the world economy.

The West Germans and the French blame the problems on U.S. budget deficits, but President Reagan will not budge in his refusal to raise taxes. The British point the finger at Japan’s trade barriers, but the United States says the Japanese have been helpful and trains its own heavy guns at West German unwillingness to boost domestic growth.

So instead of simply agreeing to disagree, the leaders of the seven industrial democracies are on the verge of vowing once again, as they did at last year’s Tokyo summit, to keep trying to find a common and coordinated approach for solving their interlocking problems. Their communique is expected to be released today.

“What’s important, I think, is to institutionalize the process (of economic coordination),” an Administration official said in a briefing for reporters Tuesday. “The new process was conceived in Tokyo and it’s going to be born here.”

But even before the delivery, some wags in the press are talking more about a stillbirth. The United States pressed its trading partners to disclose details of the coordination plan, which involves reliance on an agreed set of indicators to monitor overall world economic performance. It also wanted the resulting economic information to be made public, as a means of putting public pressure on nations that fail to live up to their commitments.

However, the only way the United States could win agreement, the Administration official conceded, was to keep all the details secret.

The problem with developing a better system of privately monitoring economic performance, as the finance ministers and central bankers of the seven leading industrial democracies have done over the past year, is that it is only a pale substitute for actually agreeing in public to change economic policies in ways that would improve the prospect for sustaining world growth and reducing trade imbalances.

“There are certain things we can do,” Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III said Tuesday in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning, America.” But, he conceded, “this is a continuing process. This is not something that we can just expect to do when we come to the summit.”

True enough, most analysts agree, but the question coming out of the Venice summit is whether currency markets will give economic officials the luxury of enough time to resolve their differences.

Baker, after nearly two years of stunning performances on the international economic stage--beginning in October, 1985, at New York’s Plaza Hotel with an accord to manage the orderly devaluation of the dollar, continuing with a new approach to overcoming the problems of Third World debt, through the recent agreement in Paris to stabilize currencies--may be nearing the end of his hit show.

The act had a long, successful run, but from now on, Baker is likely to have a lot more trouble pulling new rabbits out of his hat with which to wow the audience in the financial markets.

“We all want steady growth--non-inflationary, sustained,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said Tuesday as she left Venice early to return to Britain to continue her reelection campaign.

Easier said than done. As a parting shot, Thatcher took dead aim at the Japanese. “We had a long discussion about protectionism,” she said. “Our purpose of course is to open up the Japanese market, and we do not think that the steps that they have taken will be enough. We do not think that they will bring down their (trade) surplus enough.”

But even as Thatcher was focusing attention on Tokyo, the Japanese, the West Germans and the French all agreed that the U.S. budget deficit remains the source of economic instability.

French President Francois Mitterrand, emerging from one session Tuesday, summed up the view: “It is clearly necessary to reduce budget deficits, especially in the United States.” Reagan Administration officials counter this position by pointing to the dramatic $40-billion deficit reduction expected during this fiscal year as evidence that they have done more than expected to fulfill their end of the bargain.

A Japanese spokesman replied, however, that “Baker doesn’t talk about the 1988 deficit.”

“When this summit is over,” White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. said earlier this week, “it is likely that there will be significant accomplishments that will be announced. It is, after all, an economic summit. It is not a political summit, it is not a diplomatic summit, it is an economic summit. I think there’ll be important news coming out of the summit.”

Not everyone here is as sanguine as the White House chief of staff.