ABSTRACT
The third world has shrunk to Africa. By this I mean to dramatize a process of bifurcation that has taken place among developing countries. For the past forty years, our language and our concepts have divided the world into a rich minority and a poor majority: a world of roughly one billion rich versus five billion poor, or a world of 20 percent versus 80 percent, as it is sometimes expressed. Our growing penchant for benchmarking progress in development, through global poverty counts and through the Millennium Development Goals, focusing on the five billion, reflects this thinking. 1
