Characteristics Of The Third World Countries

The concept of DEVELOPMENT.

By third world, we mean the countries if Latin America, Asia and Africa. These are countries that have been incorporated into the international capitalist system through an external choice and design. These nations have a uniform history of colonial experience and were victims of imperialist adventure of the West in the 18th and 19th century.

The patterns of state formation in these countries was such that diverse ethnic nationalities were forcefully integrated for the purpose of administrative convenience of the exploiters. Nigeria is example. 

The third world countries covers the largest part of the earth's surface with a population that is two-third of the world. The third world country is not a monolithic term. Some countries have gone beyond the rhetoric of development to actualize their potentials. 

THE Third World, from the liberal perspective.

This concept is used by the bourgeoisie or the liberal theorists to refer to underdevelopment as countries whose economies are generally characterized by extremely low standard of living.

FROM the Marxist perspective, the radical scholars, they see no wisdom in the division if the globe into groups or countries based on economic potential as well as level of development and attainment. Instead, they use terms such as 'satellite' and periphery to describe the exploited countries.

The Orthodox perspective.

This perspective is projected by the west and their agents i.e the Breton Woods institutions.

Several names have been devised by scholars to explain this phenomenon - Washington consensus, economism and development merchant system.

In the orthodox perspective, development is conceived as an improvement in the terms of trade,  increase in GDP, low inflation, low interest rates liberalization of the economy. 

The Alternative Perspective.

There is an alternative perspective which conceives development as human development, people's empowerment, political participation, poverty reduction and economic freedom. Free and quality education, sound social services and protection of the vulnerable people are also pointers of development according to this school.

UNDERDEVELOPMENT.

Various theories have been advanced by sociologists, economists, political scientists to explain development from the liberal

The perspective of sociologists to the issue of underdevelopment is the faulty assumption that the new nations of Third World countries will follow the same path as that taken by Western European nations, and the theoretical paradigms developed to explain the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe was imported wholesale into the study of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The first mixture of these theoretical postulation was the evolutionary taxonomy of Traditionalism and Modernism. 

Scholars sought to identify series of evolutionary universal which demarcates stages of social evolution and an example of a theory of social evolution was the theory of social Darwinism, which was essentially occasioned by the expansion of empires in Europe.

Herbert Spencer defined evolution as a change from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity.

This theory involves some opposition. The problems are:

- The first concerns a simple sequence of stages which all nations must pass.
- The second problem concern a mechanism which shifts a society from one evolutionary stage to another.

In other words, what essentially is this mechanism that has the ability to move a country from one stage to another?

The major problems with this theory are:

- Can all forms of social change be conceptualised as variations on a differentiation, re-integration process?
- How is the viability of institutionalized solutions to the problems arising from a given level of structural differentiation to be explained?

Traditional and Modernisation theories as variants of evolutionary theory. The assumption underlying these theories is that all societies were alike at one stage or the other, meaning that they were initially traditional, and they will eventually passed through the same set of changes that have happened in the West and become modern.

In Rostow's stages of economic growth, he asserted that all societies pass through a single, unique sequence of stages. His analysis centers on the need to increase the rate of capital investment in a society to a point where growth becomes automatic. He emphasized the need to stimulate the appearance of an entrepreneural elite which will lead the development process.

The Marxian theory revolves around the role of bourgeoisie in a supposed transition from feudalism to capitalism in the countries of the Third World.

Characteristics and features of The Third World, that differentiate from first world 

- Hunger. One of the basic needs of life is food. So the countries with a lack of it are characterized as third world countries.
- Malnutrition
- Illiteracy
- High maternal death. High mortality rate
- High infant mortality
- Massive unemployment
- Decadent public institutions
- Weak state capacity. The failure of the state has made people resort to other institutions. 
- Low patriotism. 
- Corruption
- Low capacity for capital accumulation. In the fight against corruption, a lot of money has been recovered, but no 
- Vulnerability to the forces of globalization
- Dependence on aids.
- Arena of competition for resources