What Challenge?

Abstract

The United Nations has proclaimed the need for a New International Economic Order and a programme of action to achieve it. Neither the objections to the old order nor the proposals for establishing the new order contain much that is different from earlier demands from developing nations. What was new about the Sixth Special Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, held in April 1974, at which these demands were ventilated, was a change of atmosphere. The oil crisis and the commodity boom of 1973/4 had produced some real change in the balance of power between the developed and the developing nations and a great deal of misconception, too, about the degree of the shift and the likely long-run outcome. The programme of action consists largely of measures which entail sacrifices or concessions — by those countries which are classed as industrially developed — in order to assist the countries of the so-called Third World.