International Economic Disorder and North-South Relations: An Introduction

The decade of the 1970s has been characterised by turbulence and disorder within the world economy. The most severe recession since the 1930s checked the general post-Second World War mood of optimism and self-confidence with respect to growth and increased already existing anxieties concerning the efficacy of macroeconomic management. At the same time, rapid inflation in the industrialised countries proved extremely difficult to curb, and intensified latent social and political tensions. The ‘international economic order’ carefully erected during the 1940s was placed under increasing stress, eventually sufficient to bring down its monetary arrangements and threaten those in the sphere of trade. As if all of this were not enough, the developing countries—both individually and in groups—launched a vigorous intellectual, political and policy attack upon the old ways of ordering the world economy. Most dramatically successful in the OPEC case, they formed a variety of new collective bargaining units and pressed for a number of reforms in international institutions and practices, all under their new banner of The New International Economic Order’.