Chronicle Behind Poverty In The Third World

There is no lack of information on the extreme forms of deprivation which the majority of people in this world now suffer. Most of these people live in Asia, Africa and Latin America. There are, in addition glaring inequalities in wealth between different parts of the world and also within individual countries. The ‘widening gap’ between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries has become a cliché. There are also a good many indications, less well documented perhaps, that the situation of the very poor, especially in rural areas in underdeveloped countries, is becoming worse in absolute as well as in relative terms, mainly because distribution within countries is becoming more unequal. Whatever the historical peculiarities of industrial development in Britain, the crucial question is what effect this had on development elsewhere. The conventional wisdom is, as been said, that the British and other colonial powers have helped the rest of the world to escape from the backwardness in which they found them, to which they were doomed by the failings of their societies, if not by the inherent weaknesses of their peoples.