perhaps the greatest challenge to theories positing systematic differences between countries economic policies comes from the influence of international factors. Even by the early 1990s, it was widely acknowledged that advanced capitalist economies needed not only to compete with each other,but also to 'respond to growing pressure from newly industrializing third-world nations where labour is cheap and some developmental shortcuts (for example, copying technologies) are possible' (Heidenheimer et al., 1990:170).