Global fracture

The new international economic order

Michael Hudson, Pluto, paperback, 296 pages, £19.95

The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was developed in the early 1970s by third world countries to build up their agricultural and industrial self-sufficiency. It was designed to improve the terms of trade for raw materials - for example through higher oil prices.

This book discusses how the weakness of the US economy made such an economic order possible, but also how the US reasserted its financial and economic domination through neoliberalism at the beginning of the 1980s.

The NIEO is now a forgotten interlude - though echoes of it live on in the OPEC oil cartel, the United Nations and in some governments, especially in Latin America.

The author shows the NIEO was not especially left-wing - pointing out that it was embraced by nationalist and reactionary leaders, such as the Shah of Iran.

But Hudson suggests a different path was possible before neoliberalism took hold.