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Demography 375
value of such marginal goods and services is small and they can frequently be
offered free of charge. But as soon as a foreign tourist takes advantage of them,
they immediately acquire a great value. When a foreign tourist sits down in a
cinema in a seat which would otherwise have remained empty, it is just as though
the country had an additional worker at its disposal and, what is more, a high
quality one at that, since he is free to choose his kind of activity. For with the
money spent by the tourist, the country wil be able to buy anything it likes on
the international market.
Once more, one meets with the three chief means of obtaining money avail-
able for use on the international market - labour, capital income, and recourse
to foreign States.
The income obtained from labour can be direct when a country has some of
its workers living abroad who have not severed their ties with the mother coun-
try and send remittances to it. This form of income can be quite large in some
cases, but remains small taken as a whole. The amount of income received
through international trade is decidely greater: in selling its products, a country
is, in effect, selling its work.
Income derived from capital follows exactly the same course as that de-
scribed at the national level.
Income from foreign States which was for a long time supplied under
colonialist conditions is now given more and more in the form of bilateral or
international aid.
65. Such means have their limit - and in the first place of a currency order -
on an international scale, exactly as they have on a national scale. Whoever
possesses currency that can be exchanged on the international market is
able to obtain whatever he wants with it. If this power is too widespread, and
especially if it is misused, it can endanger the normal working of the internation-
al monetary system. We saw this recently in connexion with what was called the
gold crisis. Economic aid is naturally limited by the generosity of the donors.
In this connexion, the United Nations made the following proposition to the
wealthy countries, namely, I % of their national revenue, which percentage, in
the aggregate?O has never yet been reached.31 Income derived from capital is,
taken as a whole, restricted to 25 % of the total world product.
But this refers to global limitation. Just as, in a given country, the limitation
of capital income to 25 % of the gross national product does not prevent cer-
tain persons from obtaining very big incomes by this means, so there are
countries which obtain a great deal of money by lending abroad. There are
also countries which receive considerably more economic aid than the average.
On the international level, countries play the same r6le as do individuals of
a particular country. But whereas there are a great many individuals, there is
only a small number of countries, about one hundred, and the exceptions are
no longer submerged in the general mass. On the contrary, they stand out as
examples and might well be put forward as standard types without it being
noticed that, in point of fact, they are exceptional cases.