Business: Compromise in Nairobi

For more than two years—essentially, since the oil crisis—the Third World has been clamoring for a "new international economic order" in which a greater share of the world's wealth would be directed toward developing countries. Last weekend the fourth United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD IV) adjourned after 24 days of intense bargaining in Nairobi between the industrialized north and the poorer south. Though the less developed countries (LDCs) did not by any means win all their demands, delegates hoped that an eleventh-hour compromise would preserve the fragile climate of cooperation that has characterized north-south, rich-poor economic relations in...