Word: ldcs
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...FOURTH WORLD contains the LDCs that have some raw materials, some modern economic infrastructure and some trained technocrats and administrators and thus could eventually achieve self-sustaining economic growth. But unlike Third World countries, they need significant financial help and special treatment by the industrial powers to spur exports of their goods and imports of technology. This group, with a population of 930 million, includes Peru, the Dominican Republic, Liberia, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand and Guinea-Bissau...
...hands. Two related events galvanized them into a cohesive bloc: the 1973 decision by the ministers of OPEC to quadruple the price of oil, which had been $2 per bbl., and the Arab nations' imposition of an oil embargo at the time of the October War. The LDCs-even those not directly involved in oil exports or the Middle East conflict-were exhilarated. They saw both actions as proof that the industrialized West was vulnerable to collective pressures from the poor nations. "For the first time since the rise of Western capitalism, a decision affecting the world economy...
...debatable whether the First World has really been using trade to exploit the developing countries. If that were so, notes British Economist P.T. Bauer, then nations like Taiwan, Singapore, Brazil and South Korea, which are the most involved in extensive foreign trade, would not have become the most prosperous LDCs. Bauer rightly points out that the poorest states are "those with the fewest or no external contacts...
...LDCs insist on tariff preferences for their exports and that the First World ban production of potentially competitive synthetics and substitutes. The purchasing power of the poor should be protected from any sharp decline in the value of their community exports by "indexing"-setting a fixed relationship between the price of the developing countries' raw materials and the price of the First World's manufactured goods...
Foreign aid has often been more effective than most of the poor are willing to admit. Dotting the developing countries are new dams, low-rent public housing, irrigation systems, power plants and canals. These projects have significantly contributed to the impressive 5.5% annual G.N.P. increase logged by the LDCs as a group during the 1960s, and the nearly 6% annual rise from 1970 to 1974. These gains, of course, were not evenly distributed; a dozen or so nations, such as Brazil, South Korea and Taiwan, developed much more quickly than most of the others, while a few, including Southern Yemen...