Word: third world
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Just as wars -- two World Wars and, equally important, the cold war -- dominated the geopolitical map of the 20th century, economics will rule over the 21st. All the big questions confronting the world in the century ahead are basically economic. Is the U.S. in an irreversible decline as the world's premier power? Will Japan continue its competitive conquest of international markets? Can Europe manage to hold together the world's largest trade bloc in the face of strong centrifugal forces? And does the future hold any hope at all for the poverty-stricken Third World...
Moreover, developed countries are already buying less from the Third World and more from one another. Even now, trading by the three main economic regions -- Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim -- accounts for 75% of the world's total. Over the past decade, 20 of the world's 24 largest industrial powers have signed bilateral agreements that regulate their trade and set up new barriers to imports...
Then there's the arms-for-export approach: If the U.S. can't afford any more high-tech weapons, find some Third World potentate who can. Saudi Arabia gets its F-15s; Taiwan gets F-16s (in violation, incidentally, of a 1982 agreement signed with China). Why not atom bombs for Ciskei? Cruise missiles for Serbia? Lofty moral objections aside, one problem with the export approach is that it puts the U.S. government in the unseemly position of pimping for the military- industrial complex -- using taxpayers' money, for example, to set up arms fairs abroad. The other problem is that...
...Weiss's Defense Economic Adjustment Act shows how to go about it, as does the fine new book Dismantling the Cold War Economy, by Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken. The possibilities are endless: high-speed transit systems, waste-disposal technology, high-tech machinery that we now (like any Third World country) are forced to import...
Anglade is a 1992 graduate of the Law School, where she served as vice president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. She majored in history and Black and Third World studies as an undergraduate at Wellesley College...