30. The representative of the United States informed the Council that his delegation was about to submit the texts of various laws and a brief description of each of them for circulation to all Members, but expected that his delegation would make an additional submission later in the year once further programmes of the United States Government relevant to this issue had been identified and the information had been compiled. The attitude of his Government in this area was based on the United States belief in the importance of economic well-being for all countries. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had expressed this, in 1944, when he had stated that "A basic essential to peace, permanent peace, is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want. [And] it has been shown time and time again that if the standard of living in any country goes up, so does its purchasing power – and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighbouring countries with whom it trades". President Roosevelt's successors after the Second World War had acted upon that belief, with the Marshall Plan, the establishment of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund at the Bretton Woods Conference, and the creation of a more open world economy through the GATT. The United States current technical assistance policies drew on these lessons and were designed to encourage positive developments around the world. In the United States, there were, for example, special programmes that gave countries special access to the United States market. One was the Generalized System of Preferences, which gave developing countries more duty-free treatment than most of the United States' trading partners. Another, the Caribbean Basin Initiative, gave extra privileges to the United States' neighbours in the Caribbean and Central America. The newest was the African trade policy that the late Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown had begun, and President Clinton had raised to a new level in his historic visit to the continent last year. Many programmes under United States law were expressly aimed at encouraging the transfer of technology to developing and least developed countries to enable them to create sound and viable economies. Some of these programmes were of long standing, while others had been recently enacted. The United States would submit the texts of laws and a brief description of each, demonstrating its fulfilment of the obligations of Article 66.2. In addition to notifying the laws, the United States had included descriptions of some specific programmes aimed at technology transfer to Sub-Saharan Africa and to Haiti in direct response to its request. His delegation remained willing to respond to specific written questions regarding this issue in accordance with the provisions of Article 63.3.
