Understanding Third World Politics

In 1950 28 children in 100 died before their fifth birthday; this number had
fallen to 10 by 1990. Smallpox has been eradicated, whereas it claimed more
than 5 million lives annually in the Third World in the early 1950s (World
Bank, 1993, p. 1).
Such averages conceal variations between countries, regions and, of
course, social groups within countries. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example,
a region with the highest infant mortality and lowest primary education
enrolment, saw only a small improvement in infant mortality in the 1980s
and a decline in the enrolment rate. Several Latin American countries, by
contrast, saw infant mortality declining at a rate faster than that achieved in
the 1960s and 1970s. Malnutrition is on the increase in Sub-Saharan Africa,
while there is much greater variability in the countries of Latin America
(World Bank, 1990, p. 45). In Pakistan it is estimated that 36 per cent of the
population has no access to health care. Because of the economic recession
of the early 1980s there have been substantial declines in real per capita
spending on education and health in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
In East Asia the poor have access to primary education whereas in Sub-
Saharan Africa few of the poor have even this level of schooling. Less progress

6 Understanding Third World Politics

Table 1.3 Human development, 1999

Life Infant Educational Access to Adult HDIb

expectancy mortality enrolment improved literacy

at birth (per (%)a water (%)

(years) thousand (% of

live births) population)

High income 78 6 93 .. 98.8 0.
Middle income 69.5 32 74 81 85.7 0.
Low income 59.4 80 51 76 61.8 0.
Arab states 66.4 59 63 89 61.3 0.
East Asia 69.2 44 71 75 85.3 0.
Latin America 69.6 39 74 85 87.8 0.
South Asia 62.5 97 53 87 55.1 0.
Sub-Saharan Africa 48.8 172 42 55 59.6 0.

SOURCES: UNDP (2001), p. 144; World Bank (2001b), p. 18.
NOTES: aCombined primary, secondary and tertiary average for each age group.
bThe United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index (HDI)
is derived from scores given for life expectancy at birth, adult literacy levels, aver-
age years of schooling, and real GDP per capita (to indicate purchasing power). The
two educational variables are combined but with different weightings and growth in
the human development value of increases in income is assumed to fall after a cer-
tain level is reached. The three indicators are averaged to provide each country with
a score from 0 to 1.