Viewing the international economy as an amalgam of economies interacting with one another in politically neutral terms flies in face of everyday experience. Much to the contrary, power asymmetries shape economic relationships and interactions between the developed and the underdeveloped countries. As is well known, economists make the concept of power exogenous to their analysis. Liberal economics artificially separates the economy from other aspects of society and accepts the existing sociopolitical framework as given. For mainstream economists, the framework of social, political and cultural institutions lies outside their analyses of underdevelopment. Liberalism is devoid of a theory of the dynamics of international and national political economy. That makes its understanding of the wealth and deprivation of nations conspicuously incomplete. In fact during the past quarter century, the ascension of international political economy as a field of study in its own right has responded to an increased recognition that political (and other non-economic) factors between and within nations influence economic outcomes and vice versa.