In the six centuries since its construction began, the secluded Château de Rambouillet, located 33 miles from Paris, has housed a long list of illustrious guests, including Marie Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte. This weekend the château will again make history by serving as the site of the world's first postwar summit meeting devoted exclusively to economics. The three-day gathering will bring together government chiefs of six nations that account for roughly 70% of the non-Communist world's production and trade: U.S. President Gerald Ford, French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Japanese Premier Takeo Miki, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Italian Premier Aldo Moro. Their purpose: to discuss ways in which their countries can cooperate to lift the industrial world out of its worst business slump since the 1930s.
In the U.S. that slump has given way to a recovery that has lately looked surprisingly vigorous, even though it is still dogged by a distressingly high jobless rate and a possible resurgence of inflation. Last week the Labor Department reported that unemployment in October climbed to 8.6% of the work force, from 8.3% in September—the first increase in five months. In addition, October's wholesale prices rose at a horrifying, though probably misleading compound annual rate of 23.9%. But the outlook is still for continued growth in production, which will create jobs.
In the rest of the industrial world, the troubles are worse: not only has inflation been raging at rates generally higher than in the U.S., but recession still has an iron grip on most major economies. Despite the October jump, unemployment in the U.S. has come down from a peak of 9.2% in May, but it is still rising in Canada, Britain, Germany, France and most other European nations. In several, the jobless rolls are likely to go on expanding for another six months or so. In the 24 industrial countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a staggering total of 14.5 million workers are now idle—more than the entire population of The Netherlands. Production of goods and services spurted in the U.S. in the third quarter, but it is still stagnant or declining in Canada and the nine-nation European Common Market.
Worse, there are only faint and flickering signs of revival in most nations except for the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, Japan. Economists generally do not expect any real upturn in European business until mid-1976—and they worry that even then the recovery may be so weak that, in the words of OECD Secretary-General Emile van Lennep, "it would not gather momentum and might peter out." One reason: the recession has pushed the volume of world trade 10% below the 1974 level, the first decline since World War II. The drop has a vicious-circle effect: as each country's economy sags, imports are reduced and the consequent fall-off in world trade then cuts each nation's exports, deepening the slide.