42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the Left by a small group of Marxists in key government positions, as depicted in some sections of the international press, could hardly be farther from the truth; if anything, it is the enormous pressure from popular organizations for a more rapid implementation of promised reforms which is forcing the government to step up the pace of redis-tributive programmes, particularly in the provision of massive aid to the peasant sector and in the provision of health, educational and housing programmes for the majority of the population. The Nicaraguan 'Model9 On balance, therefore, it would appear that despite the serious economic problems which the economy will continue to face over the coming years, the new government has achieved a remarkable degree of success in making good the disruption caused by the war and in laying the political and institutional foundations for a new economic order. As the Sandinista leadership has made clear on numerous occasions, the Nicaraguan "model" will need to conform to the specific historical and social circumstances of the country and cannot be imported from the East or the West. At the same time, the broad features of the model are of clear relevance to other Central American countries which share a history of growth characterized by extreme inequality and subservience to foreign capital. If the Nicaraguan model can be generalized to these countries, the main features of relevance will be the following. Firstly, the need to maintain a mixed economy is deary accepted and implicit in the continued existence of a substantial peasant and artisan sector, though the government will now have decisive control over the modern productive sectors, in part through direct ownership and in part through its strategic command of banking and commerce. Secondly, the state will now act as the focus for capital accumulation and not merely as guarantor of externally mobilized finance. This requires not merely an enhanced technical capacity to plan and execute investment projects, but the ability to mobilize domestic surplus to finance accumulation at the expense of middle class consumption rather than through traditional policies of holding down wages and cutting social programmes. The problem of ensuring a sustained and autonomous accumulation process is of course closely related to reducing dependence on the United States for aid, trade and technology, though to some extent such a reduction follows automatically from the inevitable American political response. Hence the need to diversify sources of aid and technology and, similarly, to diversify the pattern of exports and their markets, particularly in the crucial agricultural and extractive fields. While the size and traditional openness of the Central American countries preclude autarky as a meaningful option, scope certainly exists for changing the present nature of their insertion into the world capitalist division of labour