Underdevelopment is the state of an organism or of an organisation (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. Poverty is the state of being without, often associated with need, hardship and lack of resources across a wide range of circumstances. ...

The concept of economic underdevelopment was popularised from the late 1960s by Andre Gunder Frank who studied the effects of imperialism in Latin America. The argument was that that rich or industrialised countries 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. Andre Gunder Frank Andre Gunder Frank, one of the founders of the Dependency theory in the 1960’s, was born in Berlin on February 24, 1929. ... A cartoon portraying the British Empire as an octopus, reaching into foreign lands Imperialism is a policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics... Latin America consists of the countries of South America and some of North America (including Central America and some the islands of the Caribbean) whose inhabitants mostly speak Romance languages, although Native American languages are also spoken. ... For other uses of the initials WTO, see WTO (disambiguation). ...

The United Nations also distinguishes between developed nations and less developed countries. The United Nations, or UN, is an international organization established in 1945 and now made up of 191 states. ... A developed country is a country that is technologically advanced and that enjoys a relatively high standard of living. ... A developing country is a country with low average income compared to the world average. ...

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. Events and trends The 1990s are generally classified as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but keeping the same mind-set. ... The maldevelopment referes to a being or an organisation that did not develop in the normal way (used in medicine, e. ...

See also

• Economics
• Economic development
• Developed nation
• Developing nation
• Imperialism