Editing Third World (section)

=== Great Divergence and Great Convergence ===

Many times there is a clear distinction between First and Third Worlds. When talking about the [[Global North and Global South]], the majority of the time the two go hand in hand. People refer to the two as "Third World/South" and "[[First World]]/North" because the Global North is more affluent and developed, whereas the Global South is less developed and often poorer.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Mimiko |first=Oluwafemi |year=2012 |title=Globalization: The Politics of Global Economic Relations and International Business |journal=Carolina Academic Press |pages=49}}</ref>

To counter this mode of thought, some scholars began proposing the idea of a change in world dynamics that began in the late 1980s, and termed it the [[The Great Convergence|Great Convergence]].<ref name="cliodynamics.ru">{{cite journal |last1=Korotayev |first1=A. |last2=Zinkina |first2=J. |url=http://cliodynamics.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=361&Itemid=1 |title=On the structure of the present-day convergence |journal=Campus-Wide Information Systems |volume=31 |number=2/3 |date=2014 |pages=139–152 |doi=10.1108/CWIS-11-2013-0064 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141008181304/http://cliodynamics.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=361&Itemid=1 |archive-date=2014-10-08|url-access=subscription }}</ref> As [[Jack A. Goldstone]] and his colleagues put it, "in the twentieth century, the [[Great Divergence]] peaked before the First World War and continued until the early 1970s, then, after two decades of indeterminate fluctuations, in the late 1980s, it was replaced by the Great Convergence as the majority of Third World countries reached economic growth rates significantly higher than those in most First World countries".<ref>{{Cite journal |url=http://cliodynamics.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=378&Itemid=1 |title=Phases of global demographic transition correlate with phases of the Great Divergence and Great Convergence |journal=Technological Forecasting and Social Change |volume=95 |date=June 2015 |page=163 |doi=10.1016/j.techfore.2015.01.017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150703063805/http://cliodynamics.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=378&Itemid=1 |archive-date=2015-07-03|last1=Korotayev |first1=Andrey |last2=Goldstone |first2=Jack A. |last3=Zinkina |first3=Julia |url-access=subscription }}</ref>

Others have observed a return to Cold War-era alignments ([[Mark MacKinnon|MacKinnon]], 2007; [[Edward Lucas (journalist)|Lucas]], 2008), this time with substantial changes between 1990&ndash;2015 in geography, the world economy and relationship dynamics between current and emerging world powers; not necessarily redefining the classic meaning of ''First'', ''Second'', and ''Third World'' terms, but rather which countries belong to them by way of association to which world power or coalition of countries, such as the [[G7]], the [[European Union]], [[OECD]]; [[G20]], [[OPEC]], [[Next 11|N-11]], [[BRICS]], [[ASEAN]]; the [[African Union]], and the [[Eurasian Union]].