Political ideologies translate into both rhetoric and actual economic policy, and both are important factors for explaining economic development such as foreign direct investment and the distribution of growth. In Nicaragua, the government calls itself “socialist”, but neither local big business nor rating firms or foreign investors seem to be anxious. In this thesis, an attempt is made to define and measure characteristics of economic ideologies, and to analyse them in a country context.Factors are identified that would be characteristic for a “leftist” or to a “rightist” ideology, and then translated into measurable indicators, used to analyse the rhetoric, planning and legislation in Nicaragua. Actual outcomes are compared with previous liberal and socialist regimes. The result indicates that the actual economic policy of the current “marxist” government can be described as liberal or mildly social democratic. A similar analysis, made of IMF and Moody’s show that their assessments are based on liberal theory.One cause for this discrepancy between rhetoric and economic policy may be that no option is available in the globalised context with its unequal distribution of resources and power.