Underdevelopment
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Underdevelopment is the state of an organism or of an organization (e.g. a country) that has not reached its maturity.
It is often used for economic underdevelopment, and then means poverty, including lack of access to health care, to drinkable water, to food, to education and housing.
The concept of economic underdevelopment was popularised from the late 1960s by Andre Gunder Frank, who studied the effects of imperialism in Latin America, and Walter Rodney, who wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The argument was that that rich or industrialised countries actively blocked or deformed the development of poor or agrarian countries, by means of policies and interventions intended to protect their global power and superior position in world trade. This concept contrasts to development, in that the latter implies a teleology whereby all societies move, more or less quickly, towards a norm represented by the West. The concept of underdevelopment, in contrast, implies the active process by which the global South has been disadvantaged.
The United Nations also distinguishes between developed countries and less developed countries.
The term underdevelopment however raises the question of what criteria can be validly used to assess development. In the mid-1990s, a new word arose to express a wider point of view, including the human and social elements, and to avoid this classification: maldevelopment.
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