Word: third world
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Many might wonder why he sought the distinction. Brazil, with a population of 147 million, is now the eighth largest economy in the noncommunist world -- and one of the sickest. Under President Jose Sarney, who took office in 1985, it has run up the Third World's largest foreign debt ($110 billion), is being choked by bureaucracy and is mired in hyperinflation. Collor's credentials for curing those woes are slender: he served only one term in the National Congress, and the sleepy northeastern state he governed, Alagoas, has only 2.3 million people. Last week, however, Collor exuded confidence...
...good news is that booming international trade is spreading wealth around the world. The bad news is that the U.S. was the world's largest creditor in 1980 but went into the red in 1985, and has become the world's largest debtor. Its trade deficit runs about $150 billion a year. Foreign holdings in the U.S. now amount to $1.5 trillion, compared with $1.2 trillion in U.S. assets abroad. And meanwhile, the grinding poverty of the Third World, by now $1 trillion in debt, has not improved in the least...
...imagined enemy in these competitive wars is usually the Japanese. Their GNP is still only third largest in the world, but it is growing much faster than those of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And in certain symbolic things Japan has already become No. 1. In 1980 six of the world's ten biggest banks were American; today eight are Japanese and only one American. In that same decade, the Tokyo stock market passed the New York Stock Exchange in total value. Average Japanese per capita income climbed past the U.S. figure. And then the Japanese bought control...
...total collapse of the Soviet Union might create almost as many global problems as it solved. Regional despotisms like Fidel Castro's Cuba or Najibullah's Afghanistan would probably wither quickly, as might many Third World Communist insurgencies. The U.S. economy would benefit handsomely from vastly reduced defense expenditures. But the blessings of a Soviet collapse would certainly be mixed. Just as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to Hitler's brutal exploitation of the resulting power vacuum, so the end of the Pax Sovietica in Eurasia might touch off an ethnic bloodbath among...
...Eastern Europe's emergence from 40 years of isolation may well come at the expense of the Third World, which will see Western concern and capital flows diverted to the transition from Communism...