First World
However, after the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the definition largely shifted to instead refer to any country with a well-functioning democratic system with little prospects of political risk, in addition to a strong rule of law, a capitalist economy with economic stability, and a relatively high mean standard of living.
Various ways in which these metrics are assessed are through the examination of a country's GDP, GNP, literacy rate, life expectancy, and Human Development Index.
This definition includes the countries of North America and Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.
John D. Daniels, past president of the Academy of International Business, defines the First World to be consisting of "high-income industrial countries".
[6] Scholar and Professor George J. Bryjak defines the First World to be the "modern, industrial, capitalist countries of North America and Europe".
[7] L. Robert Kohls, former director of training for the U.S. Information Agency and the Meridian International Center in Washington, D.C., uses First World and "fully developed" as synonyms.
[9] If we use the term to mean high-income industrialized economies, then the World Bank classifies countries according to their GNI or gross national income per capita.
[10] Early in the Cold War era, NATO and the Warsaw Pact were created by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively.
[citation needed] In this speech, Churchill describes the division of the West and East to be so solid that it could be called an iron curtain.
[citation needed] In 1952, the French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term Third World in reference to the three estates in pre-revolutionary France.
Just as the third estate comprised everybody else, Sauvy called the Third World all the countries that were not in this Cold War division, i.e., the unaligned and uninvolved states in the "East-West Conflict".
[13] With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Eastern Bloc ceased to exist and with it, the perfect applicability of the term Second World.
The Cold War, as its name suggests, was a primarily ideological struggle between the First and Second Worlds, or more specifically, the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
[citation needed] The movement of people and information largely characterizes the inter-world relationships in the present day.
Deaths from water-related illnesses have largely been eliminated in "wealthier nations", while they are still a "major concern in the developing world".
[13] Information about the comparatively higher living standards of the First World comes through television, commercial advertisements and foreign visitors to their countries.
[23] However, China leads the world in total emissions, but its large population skews its per-capita statistic lower than those of more developed nations.
[28][better source needed] As large consumers of fossil fuels, First World countries drew attention to environmental pollution.
[29] The Kyoto Protocol is a treaty that is based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was finalized in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio.
[33] Therefore, the modernization and development tradition consciously originated as a (mostly U.S.) alternative to the Marxist and neo-Marxist strategies promoted by the "Second World states" like the Soviet Union.
For thousands of years, people—and, later, corporations—have been buying from and selling to each other in lands at great distances, such as through the famed Silk Road across Central Asia that connected China and Europe during the Middle Ages.
[36] The result is a union of 27 Member States covering 4,233,255.3 square kilometres (1,634,469.0 sq mi) with roughly 450 million people.
In total, the European Union produces almost a third of the world's gross national product and the member states speak more than 23 languages.
All of the European Union countries are joined together by a hope to promote and extend peace, democracy, cooperativeness, stability, prosperity, and the rule of law.
The European Council stated that accession could occur when the prospective country is able to assume the obligations of membership, that is that all the economic and political conditions required are attained.
To be such bases, developing countries must provide relatively well-educated workforces, good infrastructure (electricity, telecommunications, transportation), political stability, and a willingness to play by market rules.
Put bluntly, multinational companies possess a variety of factors that developing countries must have if they are to participate in the global economy.
[42] Outsourcing, according to Grossman and Helpman, refers to the process of "subcontracting an ever expanding set of activities, ranging from product design to assembly, from research and development to marketing, distribution and after-sales service".
[48] It is because of competition (including outsourcing) that Robert Feenstra and Gordon Hanson predict that there will be a rise of 15–33 percent in inequality amongst these countries.
