ABSTRACT
The greater global interdependence of economic activity since the Second World War has affected the industrialized capitalist nations to differing degrees and at different times. Economies such as the UK and the Netherlands have always been more ‘open’ (i.e. more dependent on trade) than those such as France and, especially, the USA. The relative self-containedness of the US economy made it easier for Americans to ignore the signs of their gradual loss of industrial hegemony, until major disruptions of the status quo in the 1970s (see Ch. 1) revealed just how far their economy was losing its competitiveness and had become integrated, vulnerably so, into the global economy.
