Who Invented the Third World?

Peter Bauer and Basil Yamey—professors of economics at the London School of Economics—pose an arresting question about the Third World in the summer issue of The Public Interest. “What is there in common between, say, Thailand and Mozambique, Nepal and Argentina, India and Chad, Tuvalu and Brazil, Mayotte and Nigeria?”

What they have in common is that they are all recipients of Western economic aid—government-to-government style. In fact, Bauer and Yamey argue that their status as aid recipients is actually the common tie that binds together the otherwise disparate nations of the Third World: “This has been so ever since practically all of Asia, Africa, and Latin America came to be lumped together in the late 1940s as the underdeveloped world, and thereafter known successively as the less-developed world, the nonaligned world, the developing world, the Third World, and now the South. These expressions never made any sense except in that they denoted a collectivity of aid recipients.”

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Michael A. Scully

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Peter Bauer and Basil Yamey—professors of economics at the London School of Economics—pose an arresting question about the Third World in the summer issue of The Public Interest. “What is there in common between, say, Thailand and Mozambique, Nepal and Argentina, India and Chad, Tuvalu and Brazil, Mayotte and Nigeria?”

What they have in common is that they are all recipients of Western economic aid—government-to-government style. In fact, Bauer and Yamey argue that their status as aid recipients is actually the common tie that binds together the otherwise disparate nations of the Third World: “This has been so ever since practically all of Asia, Africa, and Latin America came to be lumped together in the late 1940s as the underdeveloped world, and thereafter known successively as the less-developed world, the nonaligned world, the developing world, the Third World, and now the South. These expressions never made any sense except in that they denoted a collectivity of aid recipients.”