The following review apperared in _PEWS NEWS_ (Newsletter of the
Political Economy of the World-System section of the American
Sociological Association) Fall, 1993:2-3

                       PEWS AWARD TO SUTER

The ASA Section on the Political Economy of the World System has
selected Christian Suter's _Debt Cycles in the World-Economy:
Foreign Loans, Financial Crises, and Debt Settlements, 1820-1990
(Westview, 1992) as recipient of its 1993 Award for a
Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship.  This beautifully-
crafted work is a remarkable blending of methods (statistical,
macro-historical and theoretically-relevant case studies), all
focused on illuminating the world-systemness of debt cycles.
     Suter demonstrates the existence of global cycles of
indebtedness, debt crises, and debt settlements.  In addition,
Suter finds that these debt cycles are coterminous with cycles of
global growth and stagnation.  Suter has assembled world-wide and
long-term statistical data, much of it original and/or brought
together for the first time, which demonstrate the operation of
four Kondratief cycles of synchronic debt defaults in large
number of countries (mostly but not exclusively in the Third
World) between 1820 and 1990.  These data support his theory that
the usual historical ad hoc explanations for individual country
indebtedness, so common in the literature, miss the role that
core capitalist countries play both in stimulating debt and in
resolving periodic and pandemic debt successive crises have been
resolved in different ways.[sic]  Part 3 of the book traces the
debt histories of Peru, Liberia, and Turkey, cases selected to
illustrate three of the country "types" his theory specifies.
The case studies of model of thick (and accurate) descriptions.
     The relationship between the macro-analysis and the case
studies is best described by the author himself:  " [A]t the
global level of the world-economy there is strong evidence for
the existence of debt cycles which can be shown to be correlated
to long swings in the real economic phenomena...[but] the
periodic recurrence of rising indebtedness and...insolvency [must
also be] explained in part by processes operating on the lower
level of individual Third World countries, namely, the
interaction between political regimes and external debt" [p.
111].
     Particularly valuable is the book's integration of processes
which are often studied separately.  While the three main forms
of economic dependency:  trade dependency, debt dependency and
direct foreign investment are often treated in isolation, this
book gives us a glimpse of how economic dependency can beget
another.  In Suter's chapter on Peru, for example, he shows how
booms and bust in trade dependency are intimately related with
debt dependency.
    The book is a model of sophisticated reasoning, solid and
detailed knowledge, and parsimonious and clear writing.  It
constitutes a significant and lasting contribution to the field
of the political economy of world-systems.
                        Awards Committee