ABSTRACT
Although the Third World’ is now a widely used term, it is employed in so many different ways that one cannot assume a universal definition. 1 As Worsley points out (1980), this is not merely due to a lack of intellectual rigour but is also the result of various historical conceptions of the term that evolved at different times in response to different situations. According to the same source, the term, was first used by the French demographer, Alfred Sauvey, who in 1952, in the title of an article, applied it to those countries which were outside the two international power blocks, and also, at the time, outside the communist world. In this paradigm, the ‘First World’ refers to the capitalist industrialised countries; the ‘Second World’ is made up of the centrally planned economies; 2 and the ‘Third World’ represents the remaining ‘developing’ countries.
