ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Third World and considers three recent approaches to addressing the deteriorating economic and social conditions that shape the lives of the elderly in these countries. The emerging political economy of aging, however, has focused largely on the conditions of old people in western industrialized societies and thus has neglected the situation of more than half of the world’s elderly—those residing in Third World nations. A political economy approach to aging in the Third World would consider such issues as the nature of the economic relationships that bind advanced industrialized countries to Third World nations. The documentation of virtual economic stagnation, debt load, military dictatorships, and wars fueled by nationalism and/or fundamentalism has resulted in a continuing critique of development theories. The existence of dependencies is not questioned by human scale development theorists, but is seen as coming in a variety of forms—economic, financial, technological, cultural, and political—and as operating on local, regional, national, and international levels.
