Third World

An anachronistic term used to differentiate “developing” countries from the industrialized countries of the West (the “first world”), and the communist countries of the Soviet bloc (the “second world”).

It is also often used synonymously with the phrase “less developed country,” and as such is applied to countries with relatively low levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita.

An alternative framework, based on the notion of human development, has been developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The term Third World is still in use today by social researchers, although its usefulness has diminished since the end of the Cold War. The term has also been criticized by dependency and world-systems analysts for not acknowledging the interdependent nature of the global economic system.

In contrast to the modernization theories of the 1950s (which, based on the notion of progress, posited that countries would undergo a stage-like process of economic development), dependency and world-sys-tem analyses argue that “Third World” countries are poor not because they have not integrated into the world economy or because they have not had enough time to develop, but because their position in the world economy is one of dependency. As such, countries in the “periphery” play a secondary role in the global economy; they provide raw natural resources, cheap labor, and a market for excess goods from the “core” countries. These notions have been discussed primarily by Andre Gunder Frank (who developed a Marxist version of dependency theory) and Immanuel Wallerstein (founder of the world-system theory in sociology).

A more contemporary framework developed by the UNDP uses a distinction based on the notion of human development. Every year, the UNDP publishes a Human Development Report which presents the rank ordering of countries on the human development index (HDI). The index reflects a country's level of population health (operationalized as life expectancy at birth), education (operationalized with two [Page 1658]measures: adult literacy rate and gross enrollment ratio), as well as standard of living (operationalized as GDP per capita). The resulting index has a theoretical range of close to 0 (extremely low human development) to 1 (extremely high human development). Based on HDI values, the UNDP classifies countries as having high human development (reflecting HDI values of 0.800 or more), medium human development (HDI of 0.500–0.799), and low human development (HDI of less than 0.500). There is considerable overlap between a classification of a country as being considered part of the “Third World” and it having a medium or low HDI classification.

The term Third World is still in use today by social researchers, although its usefulness has diminished since the end of the Cold War.