Why are some countries still developing and considered third world?

No, it’s not luck but it does always have to do with a combination of factors – generally speaking, colonialism has to be taken into consideration when discussing any of this.

All of the above. You have asked one of the most difficult questions plaguing the world, and you’ve provided all the answers, in a very generalized form. Jared Diamond addresses this in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and he’s at least part right. He argues that geography and natural resources enabled some areas to get a big head start in technological advancement due to their ability to grow high energy grains and to raise certain animals as domestic livestock capable of supplying both labor and food. It’s not a bad argument, really. Then those countries invaded most of the others using their overwhelming dominance in weaponry and aided by the diseases they carried with them. (This is at least partly true, the Aztec empire, for example, was actually defeated because the Spanish were able to enlist the aid of other native groups who really hated the Aztecs, but Diamond is close enough). Once in control the colonizers set up systems deliberately designed to keep the local populace poor while extracting natural resources to make their home countries rich.

That explains how things got the way they are, but why do they stay that way? That’s where it gets really difficult. You’ve got some places that lack natural resources, you’ve got local government mismanagement, war, and so on. But I think the real reason is still the colonial legacy. Most developing countries were held in their colonial state with little real improvement in living conditions for the native populace until the colonizing powers had achieved even more technological progress. This enabled the major powers to become solidly entrenched in a kind of commerce that the colonized natives could not possibly partake in. Then those countries had to wage wars of independence, solicit the aid of other world powers, become pawns in an international game, and fight more wars, all of which put them farther behind. Even after independence they lack the financial resources to catch up in the game of international commerce, and many effectively become colonies again, but without the need of the world powers to directly rule them. They are economic colonies, still used for resource extraction and cheap labor with little investment in improving local living conditions and building stable, transparent, and honest government.

i feel like its probebly because of religion in alot of ways. taking pictures was considerd to steal your soul by native american tribes. and i could see how creating fire with a flick of your thumb could be seen as evil. sometimes, other countries bringing third world countries up to speed so to speak, creates a conflict of culture, wich brings up questians of morality.
at the end of the day though, taking a third world country and turning into a suburbian sociaty costs alot of cash. whos that generous.

It’s a combination. Two factors are key

- average level of education
– quality of the political system

thats a pretty sad way to look at it snarp.

@mattbrowne , people can be educated, and no political government will last forever. or even a small amount of time, especialy when other governments are setting such good examples for underdevolped countries.

@OrbenDiaz The truth is often sad.

@OrbenDiaz – Governments should not last forever. That’s the whole idea of democracy. Power is always temporary power mandated by the people.

I would like to propose a different prespective, one from someone from a ‘developing country’. I believe it has a lot to do with Colonialism!
It is not a leap to see the results of 300+ hundred years of transfer of unimaginable wealth from say The Indian-Subcontinent to England, and the effects of such hegimonic pillage! It’s something most westerners convenently overlook, when finding fault in peoples of developing countries, and their inability to recooperate from such massive and overwhelming destruction of social, cultural, and natural resources!
add to that Jared Diamond’s theory of bringing diseases, weapons of mass destruction (in relative terms, bow & arrows vs guns), and an angry Judio-Christian God over nature based dieties has wrecked havoc that will take centuries more to overcome!
and then we begin to scratch the surface to understand why we even have such disparity between peoples of the Earth.
Add to that the current new global financial system, and it’s accompanying levers like ‘the new world order’ (NAFDA, GATT, & other smaller trade agreements), and this disparity is assured (in favor of developed countries) for centries to come!

http://www.fluther.com/disc/71317/why-are-some-countries-still-developing-and-considered-third-world/

@mattbrowne , my point was that the weaker governments that exist within third world countries cannot be a key factor in the continuence of under developed countries because they are so temporrary.

whisper that link was an accedent, i was trying to navigate to a web proxy, bring up this page, and paste my latest comment so i could post it around websense and pasted the link by mistake.

The colonialism argument is interesting to me. But, I blame cultural mores, taboos, and lack of controlling births as part of what is still holding some nations back. Along with a lack of education. Also, if they are democratic nations the majority, which is the poor probably, should be able to vote in someone who can help, but it seems difficult to get in governments that are really for the people. Too much corruption.

@JLeslie You have the birth equation backwards. Economic development results in lower birth rates, rather than the other way around. Every nation on earth that has seen its birth rate fall has seen this after the country became relatively stable and successful economically.

@Snarp Do you think it would be helpful if they did get their birth rates under control? I do agree with what you said regarding the history of low birth rates.

@OrbenDiaz. You make @mattbrowne‘s point. The weaker governments that exist within third world countries are temporary because those countries haven’t been able to turn themselves into coherent nations. I’m thinking about African countries right now. These “countries” were invented by Europeans who drew the national boundaries with no interest in observing tribal boundaries, so that each of these countries is a hodgepodge of groups of people, many of them very large, who’d never had anything to do with each other. Try to make a government out of seven groups who speak different languages, have different outlooks on life, different religions, and familial systems of education rather than some kind of universal body of knowledge. “Corruption”, when you try to apply it to a “nation” of this sort, doesn’t make sense. Obviously if I am from the Green tribe, I’m going to recruit my tribal members into my government before I recruit members of the Yellow, Aqua, and Coral tribes. I can trust them; I understand them.
The USA didn’t develop the way Africa or the Latin American countries did. The original colonists shared at least a common language, as well as the obvious technical means to subdue the native people (sometimes). That made it possible – not easy, but possible – to communicate effectively when we wanted to design a system of government. As waves of immigrants have arrived and been welcomed into the labor force (while being denied respect and rights for as long as possible), they’ve figured out how to work within this system. If all of us had arrived at once from the perhaps 70 nations and language groups that make up our population, we’d have swamped ourselves in confusion.
I find it fascinating that most of us seem to think all emerging nations should adopt our systems. Why?

I just read a study showing that simple information about birth control, regardless of any other changes in a community, if given to women along with access to the technical means to control pregnancy, will instantly lower birth rates. Women don’t want eight children. Men do.

@JLeslie I think it would be good for the planet if everyone got their birth rates under control, but I’m not sure it would do anything for the economy of developing countries. I’m not sure about @susanc‘s study, but I would question its validity until I actually saw the study methods and parameters. In most places where government initiatives have sought to reduce birth rates through providing birth control and information about birth control it has been a colossal failure. It is true that women are the key to reducing birth rates, but you have to do more than provide a little information and a birth control technique. You have to empower women first. They have to be able to make their own decisions regardless of what a man says, and to provide their own income. This is rare to impossible in many developing nations. Basically, I don’t think it makes sense to somehow promote birth control to help the economy, when we have seen that these efforts tend to fail and improving the economy has been shown to help reduce birth rates. I do think that the key to any kind of economic aid is to provide education and financial assistance to women first. They tend to make much better decisions about how to use that aid than men do and when women are empowered and financially stable, that is when you will see your reduction in birth rates.

@snarp – I hate not knowing where to find that study, because it seemed startling to me too.
I too have read many stories/studies that show that women who learn about Western methods of birth control still cannot use it because it costs too much. But this phantom study did show that over time, in communities in India where no one had access to school and many people had no access to money per se, if birth control was explained and made available for nothing, the birth rate dropped immediately and stayed stable at something like the birth rate we have in the “developed countries” – about 2 and a half kids. The conclusion they drew from this was that women (not societies, but the women in them) very much prefer to bear and raise a few healthy children instead of a lot of children with not enough to eat.
I mean, duh.
I have no idea how to find this study. I feel like an idiot.

@snap – and yes, women should be empowered and financially stable. Seems like we’ve been saying this for my whole adulthood, and in spite of the ignorant fearfulness of people who can’t think it through, it still appears to be reasonable. For example, I just read an article in the NYTImes about how the shift from men earning all the money for their families to women earning some or even all of it has decreased, not increased, the incidence of divorce. Who knew. It seems as if equality is actually stabilizing.

@OrbenDiaz – I wasn’t talking about stronger or weaker governments, but greater or less political stability. Changing governments are a sign of political stability unless the time spans are too short (which happened in Germany after the first world war for example).

Take Zimbabwe as an example. Mugabe doesn’t want to give up political power. He manipulates elections. The country is not stable. The country doesn’t make any progress.

The whole Latin America, used to import laborers by the thousands, between 1500 and 1950, corresponding to a four and a half centuries lapse, receiving large labor contingents, landing in this continent, to undertake the big exploitation of this territory as well as its multiple wealth laying down, and growing underneath.

European conquerors fought native inhabitants, Indians, making them disappear by means of a genocidal proceed involved at conquering the new land, but at the same time, had to resort to imported laborers, thus becoming a fine way of extracting riches and wealth efficiently out of this continent, an attractive offer difficult to ignore.

For the first time in history it was demonstrated how labor is treated like merchandise, commodities and possessions, a characteristic too evident in America, as slaves were subject to be traded with a value at market.

Years later, advance, progress and betterment arrived to Ibero America, together with a slave market brought from Spain that would begin to operate in these lands, already in practice since time back in Senegal as well as in Guinea, in the western coast of Africa.

This is about a slave market predestined, bound to America, then offered as merchandise to a variety of adventurers who had come to America between 1500 and 1750, I reckon.

This trade would had been impossible without the cooperation of traffickers indeed, who tied up slaves in Dakar shores and Lagos, so be dispatched, facilitated and be shipped to America.

The Portuguese were the first European settlers to arrive in the area, today known as Brazil, led by adventurous Pedro Cabral, who began the colonial period in 1500. Little did Pedro know he was planting the seeds the most beautiful women, the likes of which have never before been seen on this Planet?

Unlike the colonizing philosophy of the Spanish, the Portuguese in Brazil were much less focused at first on conquering, controlling, and developing the country. Most were impoverished sailors, who were far more interested in profitable trade and subsistence agriculture than in territorial expansion.

Nonetheless, sugar soon came to Brazil, and with it came imported slaves. To a degree unequaled in most of the American colonies, the Portuguese settlers frequently intermarried with both the Indians and the African slaves, and there were also mixed marriages between the Africans and Indians.

Spain was interested in the same types of trade as Portugal and purchased slave labor from the Portuguese to work the sugar plantations in its Caribbean holdings. Slavery was abolished at the beginning of XlX century, say, slave trade, but this institution continued to exist through the end of that century until it wasn’t practiced anymore. It sprouted and grew to reach international status because America had to be colonized and populated yet further more.

Historian Alberto Adriani maintains that between the years 1850 and 1932 flowed more than ten million immigrants into Latin America. A good example today of modern immigrants would be Argentina, Uruguay and Chile as a result of European immigration landing on these beaches between 1800 and 1930.

Also Brazil has been a result of a copious immigration to America from Europe as well as it is Cuba in the Caribbean. Most Brazilians possess some combination of European, African, Amerindian, Asian, and Middle Eastern lineage, and this multiplicity of cultural legacies is a notable feature of current Brazilian culture, and still today Iberian or Italic immigrants are flowing into this America behind foot-print’s predecessors from past centuries.

However, things have changed now, seeing that Latin America has always been stricken by unemployment ranging from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, making a stop at Caracas. In these countries, workmanship has had no other choice than to flee, escape, their inhabitants migrating on a different trend.

We would wonder and speculate, who endured better, or had a better status, slaves in 1750 or the marginal poor in the shacks on Caracas outskirts today?

Answer: slaves did, regardless of treat badly, abused and lashed by the cruel relentless foreman. His status was better than a marginal person of Caracas’ slums today, despite of Independence and liberty achieved along with freedom. Their income and profits have failed to get to him today in 2010, within current contemporary society.

Simon Bolivar, a liberator with a swift, imaginative, artistic mind was quoted as saying:

“The only profit we’ve achieved to now has been independence, while a dominant tyrannical and prevailing minority is well off still living in this native land.”

Perhaps this is the reason for millions of Latin Americans to have settled and taken a root in Europe and North America?

While immigrants had been landing to this soil since centuries ago, things have changed and we are the ones who are forced to emigrate on this day and age!!