Proclamation 5655—World Trade Week, 1987

Each year, World Trade Week celebrates the many benefits of international trade to our country and all countries. This commerce strengthens our economy in many ways. Exports expand our business and employment opportunities: in the growing world marketplace, over 5 million American jobs are related to foreign sales. Imports also enrich our lives. Foreign goods increase consumer choice both in terms of quality and price. Competition from foreign producers provides an important stimulus to American producers to maintain and enhance the quality of American-made products.

Americans can be proud of the role our country plays in international trade. We are the world's largest participant in international commerce. We have also taken a leading role in ensuring the expansion of international trade around the world. Our initiative has made possible successive monetary and trade agreements that have integrated world markets and offered unprecedented prosperity. We have extended friendship to former adversaries and have seen them grow into valued trading partners. Through our impetus, the developing and newly industrialized countries become fully accepted into the world trading community.

As increased trade has led to increased integration of world economies, the growth of the world economy has become more dependent on achieving better coordination of macroeconomic policies and continued adoption of sound microeconomic policies to facilitate structural adjustment. Thus, it is crucial that cooperative solutions be found to the problems faced in the international economy.

For its part, the United States must work to regain and sustain our competitiveness in world markets; continue with its efforts to expand and improve the ground rules of world trade provided by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; and resist pressures toward protectionism. The futile prescription of protectionism would only fuel inflation; lower economic growth; and invite retaliatory policies against our exports.

It is also important for our trading partners to do their part—by dismantling protective barriers around their home markets and allowing more open competition; by adopting fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies that are in line with goals of stable growth with low inflation; and by helping resolve the problem of Third World debt.

The challenges we face are difficult. They require the strong resolve of all nations. We can and will succeed in these ventures that offer much for the American people and for the peoples of the world.

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim the week beginning May 17, 1987, as World Trade Week. I invite the people of the United States to join in appropriate observances to reaffirm the great promise of international trade for creating jobs and stimulating economic activity in our country and for generating prosperity everywhere.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this fifteenth day of May, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and eleventh.

RONALD REAGAN