The economic aspects of the international environment receive the greatest share of attention in most standard textbooks and other publications in international business, perhaps because statistics on the subject are easy to come by.
In the World Bank's annual World Development Report, the economies of the world are categorized as follows:
Category A: Low-income economies (some thirty-two countries)
Category B: Middle-income economies (some thirty-four countries)
Category C: Upper-middle-income economies (some twenty-two countries)
Category D: High-income oil exporters (five countries)
Category E: Industrial market economies (nineteen countries)
Category F: East European nonmarket economies (eight countries)
The disproportionate share of the world's wealth held by countries in the fifth category (the industrial market economies), specifically the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, is remarkable. Figure 4.5 shows the relationship between population and GNP per capita worldwide, and makes the extremely disturbing concentration of world wealth in relatively few hands starkly obvious.
Patterns of Economic Alliances. As with the political systems of the world, so with economics: the peoples of the world have attempted to organize themselves so that there will never be another worldwide depression in which the world goes hungry. Since the end of World War II, many economic organizations have been set up, some of them more ambitious than others. Some have survived and prospered; others have disappeared. The world is divided into two major economic blocks. In the West is the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and in the East is the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). Recently a rather loosely organized collection of developing and nonaligned countries was formed. Although the group now numbers more than 120, it is still called the Group of 77, or G77, after the original seventy-seven founding members.
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