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This chapter examines how the Soviet Union attacked Point Four as “A Program for Expansion under a Screen of Anti-Communism” that was no different from older forms of imperialism. While condemning American assistance, however, they applauded a fair aid policy that supported political independence and invested to promote national agriculture and industry. This signaled that they were open to joining a multilateral program and offering technical assistance and industrial machinery to underdeveloped countries, with a stress on equality and open criticism of imperialist dynamics. But what would the Soviets contribute? Western analysts thought of expertise, while critics familiar with the Central Asian precedent worried about the repression of minorities. Only in 1954 did the Soviet Union respond with a plan for the Virgin Lands, the campaign to bring up-to-date farming and irrigation techniques to backward steppe regions in Kazakhstan. This became a paradigm for what socialist modernity could offer to less developed countries. The chapter then recounts how, in the early 1950s, the world's less-developed countries began identifying as a homogeneous group. In the United Nations, the phrase used was “underdeveloped countries,” but this was soon replaced by a much more evocative concept: the “Third World.” The expression was coined in 1952 by French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who anticipated a collective awakening of the subject peoples previously ignored, exploited, and watched warily.

This chapter reviews the early post-war history of the world economy as reviewed in the Survey. It first looks at the task of reconstruction, which the Survey considered to have been very successful. It then looks at the successful transition to rapid growth in the 1950s, though with persistent concern about the recurrence of crises. The evolution of the system of international trade and payments is analysed next, with world trade embarking in the 1950s on its major historical boom but showing from early on an East/West divide and greater difficulties in reconstructing the system of multilateral payments. Finally, the chapter looks at the early post-war experience of the ‘underdeveloped countries’, where poverty remained ‘as stubborn as ever’.

This chapter discusses ‘pure theory’ analysis, so-called because it mostly ignores many important features of underdeveloped countries in order to concentrate on one relationship. The discussion also explores implications for the shadow pricing of labour, both in urban and rural production.

This chapter studies how the linkage between state power and large-scale projects that ruled during the modernization years entered a crisis in the 1970s, when modernity ceased to be an end in itself and new sensibilities replaced what in 1958 Nehru called the “disease of giganticism.” While development struggled to keep its promise to quickly grant underdeveloped countries wealth and well-being, problems related to industrialization appeared in the form of ecological imbalances. At the turn of the decade, development was considered a failure as a Cold War weapon, and there was widespread doubt about planning. Though ideology was still unyielding in the periphery, where international crises and civil wars stemming from decolonization and the failure of new states continued to fuel Cold War dynamics, in international organizations the East–West conflict rarely challenged the fundamental underlying agreement on global issues. Instead, a major cleavage ran along the old color line—between a rich, white, developed North and a colored, poor, underdeveloped South.