What are the medium-term prospects for the Nicaraguan economy where, by medium term, we refer to the year 2000? The difficult task of fortune telling is made enormously more complicated by the political economy that was established in the country by the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) after the 1979 revolution in which they, with the aid of diverse social factions, overthrew the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. After more than a decade, the FSLN then handed over power, in mid-1990, to a coalition of opposition parties (the Union Nacional Opositora or UNO) headed by Violeta Chamorro. The 1990 election brought the first peaceful transfer of power in Nicaraguan history but, perhaps, represented more an abdication by the beleaguered Sandinistas than it did a sea change in the balance of class conflict.