es necessarily entails an
increased need for well-qualified specialists in foreign trade and
international finance, both at home and abroad. The shortage of experts
in these fields is to be alleviated through an intensive personnel
training program.

Western economists believe the new law to be a step in the right
direction in that it promotes an orientation of the economy toward
exports. They hold the view, however, also shared by some Romanian
economists, that, as long as the country's currency remains
nonconvertible and prices fail to reflect the relative scarcity of
goods, it will not be possible properly to calculate the profitability
of foreign trade nor to improve the structure of the trade on the basis
of such a calculation.

In the 1960-70 period the annual trade turnover increased by 2.8 times
to a volume of 22,8 billion lei. Exports rose at an average annual rate
of 10 percent to 11.1 billion lei, and imports grew by 11.7 percent per
year to 11.7 billion lei. From 1965 to 1970 the rise in trade was more
rapid; the rates of growth were 11 percent for exports and 12.7 percent
for imports.

Although trade relations were officially reported to have expanded from
twenty-nine countries in 1960 to 110 countries in 1970, the bulk of the
trade was carried on with members of COMECON and the industrial
countries of Western Europe (see table 6). Only 15 percent of the trade
in 1970 involved countries outside these areas. Between 1960 and 1967
trade with COMECON members increased by little more than half, whereas
trade with Western so-called capitalist countries rose almost fourfold.
The difference was even more marked in the case of imports from the
West, which increased ninefold, so that imports from this area in 1967
were larger than imports from COMECON. The trend was reversed after
1967, mainly because of increasing balance of payments difficulties with
Western trade partners.

With a turnover of 5.5 billion lei in 1969, the Soviet Union has been by
far the most important of Romania's trading partners. Czechoslovakia and
the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were next in importance
within COMECON, with a trade volume of 1.5 billion and 1.2 billion lei,
respectively, in 1969. Among trading partners in Western Europe, West
Germany occupied first place, with a trade volume of almost 1.8 billion
lei, followed by Italy with a volume of 1.2 billion lei and France with
0.9 billion lei. The People's Republic of