Teaching Comparative

Jargon

Most of us know very well that the term "Third World" is anachronistic. In spite of that we, especially those of old enough to remember the Cold War origins of the term, keep using it.

Here's the Economist on the dilemma. Its focus is on economic labels (of course), but even the magazine editors admit that political factors are sometimes more important than the economic ones.

So do the labels we use affect our understanding of the politics and the countries we study?

Ins and outs

"IS IT time to retire the phrase “emerging markets”?...

"The term 'emerging markets' dates back to 1981 recalls the man who invented it, Antoine van Agtmael... 'Third worldsuggested stagnation; emerging markets suggested progress, uplift and dynamism.'

"Later in the 1980s the fast-growing economies of South-East Asia acquired the tag 'Asian Tigers'...

"In 2001 Jim O’Neill, chief economist of Goldman Sachs, came up with the acronym 'BRICs' for the next four countries it expected to enter the economic big league: Brazil, Russia, India and China. He says that the BRICs, Korea and Mexico “should not be really thought of as ‘emerging markets’ in the classical sense...

"In its search for definitive rigour, the FTSE group* has come up with three categories for what used to be known as third-world economies: advanced emerging, secondary emerging and frontier markets (which have a stockmarket but perhaps not much else)...

"'Emerging markets are places where politics matter at least as much as economics to market outcomes,' says Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy. That definition surely includes Russia..."

*The FTSE group is a company in London that maintains the Financial Times Stock Exchange Index (FTSE - pronounced "footsie") which is the British equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average that measures the activity of the New York Stock Exchange.

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Labels: comparative methodology, concepts, pedagogy, theory

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:47 AM