ABROAD

MOSCOW Economic Bloc Once again, there is talk of a summit meeting of Comecon, the economic organism that is supposed to coordinate the policies of the Soviet Union and its satellites with respect to trade and production. There has not been such a session for 13 years, partly because the inevitable admissions of weakness could not be glossed over, but also because the Eastern European countries worry that Moscow is bound to make further demands upon them. It has long been acknowledged that inter-bloc trade is sluggish and uneven. The satellites are officially bound together by something called the transferable ruble, an ephemeral exchange medium that is not so much a currency as a series of trading accounts. If one country has a deficit of transferable rubles with another, it may be settled with unwanted surpluses, such as ill-made clothing, or out-of-date automotive parts, or whatever the creditor country can be persuaded to accept. Behind this system lies the reality of hard currency, which each of the Comecon members tries naturally to collect and hoard. Hungary, for example, has developed such a strong economy that it is able to demand from other Comecon members payment in dollars for its grain. The Soviet Union is embarrassed because Comecon was supposed to be the Communist answer to the vastly more powerful economic communities of the West, especially the Common Market. Instead, it is no more than a ramshackle and stagnant structure whose very existence has become an obstacle to rational dealing. The more developed satellites, such as Hungary and East Germany, are not interested in a summit, whereas the poorer ones, like Rumania and Bulgaria, believe they stand to benefit. The Soviet Union itself would like to end some of the cumbersome and profitless arrangements that persist within the Comecon framework, and it would also like to be paid a greater percentage of hard currency for its oil, its major export westward. But the major problem facing any such summit would be the necessity to take account of the phenomena that have changed the economic face of the world in the time elapsed since the last summit, notably the information and communication revolutions—a clear temptation to postpone it indefinitely.

HONG KONG He Remains an Englishman A group of prominent citizens has left Hong Kong for London to lobby for British domicile for those in the Crown Colony who do not want to stay on after the Communist Chinese government takes over in 1997. As of now, only two thousand Hong Kong residents have British passports. This leaves in doubt the status of some two million who are merely citizens of “a British dependent territory,” presumably without a legal claim to reside permanently in the United Kingdom.