November 25, 1982

ON the eve of Thanksgiving Day the new grandmother was up to her elbows in cranberry sauce and bragging about the baby again: ''He's the most beautiful, smart, funny, unique, absolutely incredible grandbaby. He's seven months old and his name is Rafael. Rafael Friedan.'' Her name is Betty Friedan. Her new role has made her the envy of contemporaries in the feminist movement, it seems. ''They're dying, dying for their children to produce grandchildren,'' said Mrs. Friedan, a 61-year-old mother of three who knows the feeling. ''It's a basic generative urge not unique to women. I think there will be a sharper savoring of the experience with this generation of grandparents because we cannot take it for granted as much.''

They have never heard of the Pilgrims. Plymouth Rock might as well be a new kind of dance or a type of car. They have only eaten cranberry sauce as a jam on bread, and the only place they have ever expressed their thanks before is inside a cathedral. But no matter that they are not especially fond of turkey or that it makes no sense to them to stage a celebration on a Thursday instead of a weekend night, members of the Niquio family -who arrived in the United States several months ago from Argentina - will be sitting down today to their first Thanksgiving dinner. Like so many other newcomers to this country, Mr. and Mrs. Rodolfo Niquio do not always understand American customs. Thanksgiving appeared one day out of nowhere, with its explosion of crepe paper turkeys and cardboard leaves, and suddenly their building in Elmhurst, Queens, was aflutter with talk of what to put in the stuffing.

First article of a series appearing periodically on world economic problems. Not since the Depression of 50 years ago have the nations of the world faced such a bewildering multitude of economic and financial problems. In country after country, as if caught in a global epidemic, the world is afflicted with high unemployment and falling production and is beset by sagging trade, failing businesses and huge foreign debts. ''There is hardly a place in the world where countries are not in economic difficulty,'' says George W. Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and now a consultant to Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. ''The Soviet Union and Communist countries are in desperate trouble, and in the West it is hard to find a bright spot.'' Robert D. Hormats, who stepped down as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs in August to become director of Goldman, Sachs International, calls today's array of problems ''the greatest test to the prosperity of the postwar period that the world has faced.''

An article yesterday about the Octo- ber increase in the Consumer Price Index misstated the 1981 increase. It was 8.9 percent.

By all appearances, Eduardo Orozco-Prada was a very successful coffee importer. He lived on a two-acre estate in an affluent New York suburb, with an indoor swimming pool in a half-million-dollar home. From offices on Wall Street, Mr. Orozco owned or controlled numerous companies and had accounts in some of New York's biggest banks. Through these accounts and companies, Mr. Orozco, his brother and other associates moved tens of mil Last of two articles. lions of dollars in cash, say Federal authorities, whose curiosity was piqued by the large money flow. Was the 43-year-old Mr. Orozco a terrific exporter-importer, investigators asked, or was his wealth primarily from another source - money laundering?