Since the summer of 1982 the banking community has been faced with an international debt crisis of unprecedented dimensions. The debt rescheduling agreements that have been negotiated since then involve sums totalling no less than $ 100 billion. However, they give the international financial...

Whereas in 1970 most of the large EC countries were still recording real growth rates in excess of 5%, after the two oil crises there was an appreciable slowdown in economic expansion and at the beginning of the eighties even a real contraction. At the same time unemployment increased...