NEW IDEAS FOR INVESTMENT

HOW can we capitalize on the inherent desire of people all over the world that things should be done, wherever they can be done, by private enterprise?" This fundamental question was raised by David Lilienthal, onetime chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, now a consultant to foreign governments on their own development programs. Along with such far-reaching solutions as the Magna Carta of investment capital's rights proposed by Germany's Hermann Abs and the world-investment-guarantee plan proposed by Vice President Richard Nixon, the delegates had some ideas of their own on how to speed private investment. Among them:

P:Ceylon's Chelliah Loganathan, head of his country's Central Bank, urged each underdeveloped country to establish its own Development Savings Bank. Depositors would be encouraged to save by making the money they put in the bank exempt from income taxes. But if such voluntary funds were inadequate, deductions would be made from payrolls in return for stock in new enterprises. In effect, the development bank would operate like an investment trust in the U.S., diffusing stock ownership over the maximum number of depositors and eliminating the risk of a bad investment that might wipe out a single investor's capital.

P:India's Minocher Masani pointed to the success of India's Forum of Free Enterprise -a voluntary association of enlightened businessmen to tell the local people how responsible, creative capitalism works in other countries.

P:Tokyo's Taizo Ishizaka, president of the Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations and president of the Tokyo Shibaura Electric Co., suggested an international agency to exchange technical know-how and services, thus promote industrial development and combat anti-foreignism in backward countries. In much of the world, said Ishizaka, there is still a blind prejudice that "capitalism leads to imperialism" and alien rule.

P:Germany's Berthold Beitz, general manager of Krupp Industries, suggested that the job of economic world uplift is too big for the investors of any one country, instead proposed that investors form a multi-nation investment association in much the same manner that six individual contracting companies joined together to build the Hoover Dam. Such pooling, said Industrialist Beitz, would provide "a great new source of investment capital." It would be a private world bank that would receive and that would lend local currencies for investment anywhere in the world.

P:A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany emphasized that "American labor believes that private enterprise has been and can be a great force for economic and social progress." To increase its effectiveness in helping underdeveloped nations, Meany suggested 1) an International Investment Code under which nations receiving private capital or governmental technical assistance would guarantee investors against arbitrary treatment; 2) a multi-billion-dollar International Consumers Credit Fund ito underwrite long-term installment purchasing of consumer goods.

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