Developing countries

Content

• Development
• World Order in the 20th Century

The denominations that are chosen to be used to classify the countries are, many times, a postcard of an era and of a world structure that is never permanent. The division of ‘three worlds’, and the fact of cataloging all the countries in some of those three, responded to a need during the dispute between the capitalist and communist blocs in the twentieth century, where the former sought to generate a consensus on the supremacy of their ways of life: thus, they placed themselves on the first step, leaving the second to the socialist bloc and the third to the poorest countries, which had not reached still development.

Once the socialist bloc was suppressed, the space for the ‘second world’ was left vacant, and some chose to stop talking about a second world, while others considered that the totality of third World countries they then went to the second. Most decided to leave behind the idea of ​​second and third world, and start talking about underdeveloped countries Y on process of development.

Development

The idea of ​​development paths responds to a consideration that supposes linear (as a path) the path by which countries achieve high levels of growth and then economic development. The reasoning is highly confrontational with the theory, almost unanimous in economic matters, of the international division of labor and the specialization of countries: necessarily and unfortunately, the current world economic order requires that some countries are destined to lack economic development.

Developed countries Vs. Underdeveloped countries

World Order in the 20th Century

During the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the name of developing countries was used to encompass all third world countries, which were joined by some characteristics in common: predominance of natural resources and space for the production of raw materials, the highly vulnerable financial and economic structure, also subject to reforms by multilateral organizations, and low savings usually leading to low investment.

So far this century, the world economic order has changed and the idea of ​​development paths turned against the countries that had proposed them when the situation was different. It is that, while the central countries experienced a moderation in the rate of their growth, some developing countries (emerging countries) had very high growth rates in contrast, which made international leadership begin to be questioned as it was known until then, at least in the medium term.

In this way, initiatives that united the most important countries within the emerging ones were taking a position, to the detriment of the old meetings aimed at the central countries, the most important of the old capitalist bloc. There is practically no world projection in the medium term that does not grant the first places in economic development to countries of this type, and the organizations that bring them together, such as the BRICS, they are becoming increasingly important on the world geopolitical map.

See also: Examples of Central and Peripheral Countries

The list of developing countries is not defined and generates certain controversies. Below is a list of some countries considered to be developing, also called emerging countries: the first five of them are the ones that lead this process of international rearrangement.

See also: What are the Third World Countries?