The causes and consequences of the Third World debt crisis have been analyzed by scholars for more than a decade. 3 Its origin lay partly in the international expansion of . banking organizations during the 1950s and 1960s in conjunction with the rapid growth in the world economy, including the LDCs. For example, for more than a decade before oil prices quadrupled in 1973 74, the growth rate in the real domestic product of the LDCs av- eraged about 6 percent annually. For the remainder of the 1970s, the growth rate slowed but averaged a respectable 4 to 5 percent. 4 Such growth generated new . corporate invest- ment in these markets,.
