Oecd

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has revised down its economic growth forecasts for most of its 25 member countries for this year and next. The predictions were released at a news conference at the OECD, which is holding its 34th ministerial meeting today and Wednesday. A fuller report on economic forecasts will be issued in June. Such forecasts are issued twice yearly, in June and December.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher on Wednesday called on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development--often known as the West's "rich man's club"--to expand its vision and mandate to accommodate the post-Cold War world. "We cannot allow new divisions to arise. Europe must not be split into zones of prosperity and poverty, stability and insecurity," he said at the OECD's annual ministerial meeting, where Mexico became the group's first new member in more than 20 years.

Compulsory schooling has been extended in some countries, but even more striking is growing demand for education at both the pre-primary school and post-secondary school levels. Among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, school enrollment rates for very young children are "significantly higher" than 10-15 years ago. One reason: A rising demand among working parents for their young children.

Farm subsidies and import barriers cost the world's riches nations $72 billion a year in list income, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international economic research group, said in a report. Agricultural policies waste resources by overstimulating output in farming and food processing and pushing up land and consumer food prices, the study said.

Economic growth in the industrialized world will continue for an eighth straight year in 1990 at the start of a decade that promises far-reaching if unpredictable changes, the OECD said Thursday. The 24-nation think tank said in its latest semiannual outlook that economic reform in Eastern Europe should benefit both East Bloc countries and their trading partners in the West.

The United States, its economy menaced by inflation, must rapidly take steps to cut the federal budget deficit after four years of missed targets, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Thursday. In its semiannual report, OECD, a leading organization of industrialized nations, predicted that the Bush Administration will fail to meet its targets to reduce the budget deficit. It doubted whether the shortfall would be eliminated by 1993, as required by law. It also questioned the White House's view that U.S. inflation, which has risen sharply over the past year, is truly headed lower.

Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady today urged West Germany and Japan to reduce trade surpluses at the start of a two-day economic conference dominated by friction over U.S. trade policy toward Japan. "The industrial countries have agreed that reducing the large existing trade and current account imbalances is a matter of priority," Brady told the conference of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "Japan's trade surplus declined modestly last year but has increased for three consecutive quarters," Brady said.

Asia's four "little dragons" are making such headway with their new economic muscle that a movement is underfoot, led by the United States, to include them in an exclusive international trade organization. But Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are not beating down the door to join the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a group founded in 1961 to promote world trade. In Washington, a proposal to have Asia's fastest growing economies join the OECD recently came from the House subcommittee on Asian and Pacific affairs.

The leading non-communist industrial economies, which seemed on the brink of a recession a year ago, are now at their most buoyant since the early 1970s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported Tuesday. A six-month report by the influential Paris-based economic research organization said industrial output in its 24 member nations had grown at an annual rate of more than 4% since mid-1987. The brisk expansion has been widespread and investment in industry has grown especially quickly, it said.

In a report characterized by its principal author as "highly conditional optimism," the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecast Tuesday that the world will inch forward with low economic growth, but no recession, in the coming year. In the wake of the October stock market crash, the OECD is cutting its forecast of economic growth during 1988 among its 23 member states by about one-half of a percentage point, to an overall figure of 2.25%.