Whatever Happened to the Third World? A History of the Economics of Development.

• Author: de Haan, Peter

Once upon a time, there were countries that could not be categorized developmentally as anywhere close to 'the first nor second world.' They, therefore, started to be called 'the third world.' As time went on, these countries came to be classified into different groups. Development, along with economic growth, has been a big issue for developing parts of the world for decades, yet most of these countries are still struggling to overcome poverty, inequality, corruption, bad governance, and so on. Peter de Haan, in his remarkable book, discusses the development adventure of these countries in the context of the political economy of development.

In a bipolar globe, with the West as the 'First' and the Soviet Union as the 'Second World,' the rest was called the 'Third World.' 'Third World,' as a term, was coined by Alfred Sauvy in an article in L'Observateur on August 14, 1952. In Sauvy's allocation, 'Third World' consisted of the countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia which are not homogenous at all, as may be expected. India, for example, is a huge country compared to Malawi, yet they are classified together in the same group. Slightly developed countries, moreover, were put into the same level as underdeveloped ones in this very broad classification. Thus, it is fair to state that 'Third World' refers to everything that is not in Europe, America, or the Soviet Union (p. 2). So, what happened to the 'third world'?

More specifically, why have some of the countries classified as such flourished while others have deteriorated? This is the question de Haan successfully answers in this book.

The book is very well organized and divided into seven chapters. In his detailed and comprehensive work, de Haan lays out the main terms related to the subject, country classifications, what 'third world' denotes, and what happened there in terms of economic development. He provides development theories of first, second, and third generations, and finally discusses the developing part of the world's share of globalization and international trade. Even though the book is about economic development, de Haan presents a broader point of view to comprehend the process of development by taking an interdisciplinary approach. De Haan discusses new institutional economics, economic geography, new political economics, economic anthropology, and economic history in his analysis (p. 193). The main theme of the book is best summarized in his words: "economics alone...