Where Dollars Go

International

Because the world is their statistical province, experts of the League of Nations at Geneva are always a bit behind. They announced cheerfully last week that they have now caught up to 1928 in their search to find out how much U. S. tourists spend abroad and how much immigrants in the U. S. send back to the "old countries."

Incidentally the experts discovered that the peoples who travel and spend most abroad per capita are, in descending order of spending: 1) citizens of the U. S.; 2) citizens of the Dutch East Indies; 3) Argentines and Germans.

In immigrant remittances and tourist spending the U. S. disperses roughly one billion dollars annually--or did for the five years 1923-28 covered by the League survey.

Italians in the U. S. are now less thoughtful of the "old folks," their remittances having dropped sharply from a peak of $138,000,000 in 1925 to $25,000,000 in 1928. Czechoslovak immigrants quadrupled their remittances during the five-year period, to $17,000,000. Red though Russia is, she was allowed to receive from her U. S. immigrants in 1928 $10,000,000.

As everyone knows, France profits most from tourists, Canada second, Italy third, Switzerland fourth (no figures are available for Great Britain). Regretfully the League experts announced that the U. S. Department of Commerce, in its efforts to blarney European nations with estimates of how much U. S. citizens spend and send abroad, have on the whole slightly overestimated the volume of this bounty.

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