Third World

Category of countries on socio economic base

EntitygroupQ180194

Instance of: group

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, the Southern Cone, Western European countries and other allies represented the "First World", while the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Romania and the rest of the Warsaw Pact and their allies represented the "Second World". This terminology provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the Earth into three groups based on political divisions. Due to the complex history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition of the Third World. Strictly speaking, "Third World" was a political, rather than economic, grouping.

Overview

All data

30 statements · 23% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Follows: Second World
Theorized by: Alfred Sauvy(1952)
1
Sources
1.fortune.com/2023/07/03/what-is-global-south-china-india-third-world-developing-countries/
View statement on Wikidata ↗
Has part(s) of the class: country

On other databases

27 identifiers linking Third World across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

23%

externally sourced

Source last edited September 10, 2026. AIDb refreshes this page daily.

Suggest a fact or correction

Links

Use this data

curl https://aidb.si/api/v1/entities/Q180194

API docs, limits & keys

Cite this page

AIDb. (2026). Third World (Q180194). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/third-world-Q180194