ABSTRACT
The dynamism of international economic relations has been vividly evidenced by global events of recent years. The changing roles of the main actors on the world stage has meant that the assumptions underlying their influence and behaviour, as conceived even in the late 1960s, are no longer appropriate for predicting the course of economic events in the 1980s. But, because of time lags, both in perceiving these changes and in adapting policy to them, the actions of politicians and government officials may well have effects very different from those that they had originally intended.
