The carrot-and-stick strategy has emerged after lengthy debate over how to handle the potential economic disintegration of the world's fourth most populous nation.

But it remained unclear how such shifts could halt, much less reverse, what appeared to be an accelerating process of economic and social disintegration.

European members of Nato will have their own economic disintegration to worry about.

It is one more testament to the three years of economic and social disintegration here.

Now the Soviet Union faces economic disintegration and serious shortages.

Their economic viability, at no time very great, has become fragile risking complete social and economic disintegration.

But the military leader was said to be clearly in charge, though unable to halt the economic disintegration going on around him.

This worsened the Soviet Union's economic disintegration, and was a major factor in its 1991 collapse.

They are coming under attack from outside and are being undermined from within by economic and social disintegration.

"If we had, the hemisphere would look very different, and much of the economic and political disintegration wouldn't have occurred."