North and South here are wealth maps, not equator lines
Global North and Global South group countries by socioeconomic traits—roughly developed versus developing or least developed—not by which side of the equator they occupy. UNCTAD and other bodies use the South label as a less loaded stand-in for older Third World talk.
The two labels sort countries by socioeconomic standing and often stand in for developed and developing. UNCTAD places Northern America, Europe, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand in the North, and Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the rest of Asia and the rest of Oceania in the South. Richer northern states tend to export advanced manufactured goods, while southern economies lean on agriculture and other primary sectors and are commonly marked by lower incomes, higher poverty, faster population growth, poor housing and weak health systems. Scholars disagree over whether globalization has narrowed the gap or widened it.
The activist writer Carl Oglesby used the phrase global south in 1969, in a Commonweal issue on the Vietnam War, arguing that centuries of northern dominance had produced an intolerable social order. It spread slowly: fewer than two dozen publications used it in 2004, but hundreds did by 2013. Development agencies adopted it as a more open, less value-laden replacement for Third World.
That older term came from Alfred Sauvy's 1952 article Trois Mondes, Une Planète, written amid a Cold War split between a Soviet and Chinese East and an American-led West. The 1955 Bandung Conference gathered Third World states seeking an alternative to either bloc, and the first Non-Aligned Summit followed in 1961. At the 1973 summit in Algiers, members called for a New International Economic Order negotiated between North and South, the same year the Arab OPEC oil embargo pushed prices up. After the Soviet collapse some former Second World states moved toward the First World and others toward the Third.
In the 1980s the Brandt Report, named for former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, drew a dividing line near 30 degrees north that ran between the United States and Mexico, passed north of Africa and the Middle East, climbed over China and Mongolia, and then dipped to put Japan, Australia and New Zealand in the rich camp. Critics now call it outdated, yet it is still used to picture inequality. South–South cooperation names efforts by southern countries to work together on shared economic, political and technical goals.
Source: Global North and Global South
