Curated playlist
Economic country classifications
- Group of 77The Group of 77 began with a single document signed on the 15th of June 1964. Seventy-seven nations, most of them newly independent, put their names to what they called the Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Countries at the United…
- G20The G20 brings together 19 sovereign nations, the European Union, and the African Union - a collection of governments whose member states alone account for roughly 85% of everything the world produces in a year. That is a staggering…
- Developing countryDeveloping country is a term that appears in textbooks, international treaties, and UN reports, but no one can fully agree on what it means. The World Bank classifies the world's economies into four groups based on gross national income…
- BRICSBRICS began as a line in a Goldman Sachs research paper, and became one of the most debated geopolitical groupings of the 21st century. In 2001, British economist Jim O'Neill coined the term BRIC to designate a cluster of emerging markets…
- Developed countryDeveloped country is a label that shapes how trillions of dollars move around the world, which nations receive aid, and which governments sit at the tables where global economic rules get written. Yet the United Nations Statistics Division…
- Third WorldThird World is a term born in crisis, coined not by a politician but by a demographer named Alfred Sauvy. On the 14th of August, 1952, his article appeared in the French magazine L'Observateur, and the phrase he used, tiers monde, was a…
- World Bank high-income economyThe World Bank high-income economy classification draws a single bright line across the globe: a gross national income per capita of US$13,935 or more in 2024. Cross that threshold and your country earns a label that carries enormous…
- Second WorldThe Second World was one of three categories that Cold War strategists used to divide all of humanity. At its core sat the Soviet Union, founded in 1922, and around it orbited states from Mongolia to Cuba, from East Germany to Angola. The…
- G8On the 24th of March 2014, the G8 effectively ceased to exist. Seven governments cancelled a planned summit in the Russian city of Sochi and suspended Russia's membership. The forum had gathered heads of government annually since 1997,…
- First WorldFirst World is a geopolitical label that carries more history than most people realize. It did not begin as a measure of wealth or living standards. It began as a weapon of the Cold War, a way of sorting the globe into camps based on which…
- G7The G7, the Group of Seven, began not in a grand hall of international diplomacy but in a library. On the 25th of March 1973, George Shultz, the United States secretary of the treasury, gathered three finance ministers from West Germany,…