ABSTRACT
This chapter considers features of the global industrial economy that contribute to environmental degradation and social turmoil, and those that can play a key role in overcoming them. The industrial and financial interdependence of the higher income countries meant that avowedly socialist and social democratic governments were obliged to adopt many free-market policies and to swim with the tide. The management of debt relief has been based to a large extent on setting strict conditions on debtor countries' economic policies in the hope that these will lead to improved performance and renewed credit-worthiness. The developing role of the actors has been crucial in the main structural trends in the international economy. The enormous expansion of international trade has been a fundamental element in the globalization of industrialism and in the spreading influence of capitalism. The scale of current Western consumption is of a different order from anything known in pre-industrial times and the earlier periods of modernity.
