ABSTRACT
In the 1970s and 1980s, the United States began to suffer from what is called ‘relative economic decline’. This means, for example, that although the American economy continued to grow, it did so at a slower rate than its main economic competitors, especially Japan and Germany. These two countries had a different approach to political economy from the United States and some began to think that the American model was out of date. Moreover, smaller but dynamic countries in Asia and Europe were also progressing rapidly and were making the American economy look inefficient. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, India, Brazil and, above all, China emerged as dynamic economies.
