economic growth.
• Nigeria was an oil-producing country and a member of OPEC.
• Africa exported native art.
Europe
• During World War I, European nations, and Great Britain in particular, failed to recover their
dominant export position, losing out to the United States and Japan.
• In the first half of the twentieth century, most Eastern European nations were primarily agricultural,
relying on sales of their products to Western Europe.
• The European Economic Community (Common Market) was organized in 1958 by West
Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. It reduced tariffs among
member nations and created a common tariff policy for other world nations.
• In 1992, Great Britain joined the European Economic Community, and was later joined by Ireland,
Denmark, Greece, Spain, and Portugal.
• In the mid-1990s, Finland, Sweden, and Austria joined the economic community, now called the
European Union .
• In 2002, a common currency, the euro , was accepted by most member nations of the European
Union, with Great Britain serving as a notable exception.
Latin America
• World War I and European trade brought prosperity to Latin America. Latin American nations also
had to produce for themselves the products they could no longer import from Europe during the
war, a concept known as import substitution industrialization .
• The Great Depression caused a decline in the purchase of Latin American products.
• The United States was Cuba’s leading trade partner prior to 1959. Fluctuation in world demands for
sugar made Cuban prosperity uncertain.
• After the Cuban Revolution, Cuba’s economy was tied into that of the Soviet Union. Cuba’s
economy deteriorated rapidly after the fall of the Soviet Union.
• Colombia was a major participant in the international drug trade.
• Brazil exported exotic woods.
• Venezuela, an OPEC member, and Mexico were oil-producing countries.
• At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Latin American nations were more heavily
industrialized than before.
North America
• During World War I, U.S. exports rose so rapidly that, for the first time in its history, the United
States became a creditor nation.
• After World War I, the United States exported motion picture films. The United States also
distributed food such as wheat and corn to war-torn European nations after both world wars. By the
1960s and 1970s, U.S. fast foods had reached locations around the globe, including the Soviet
Union and the People’s Republic of China. Industrial supplies continued as a major U.S. export
throughout the twentieth century.