User:Julian Crant/sandbox

The North-South divide is a conceptual framing of global patterns of inequality in areas such as wealth, industrialization, and geopolitical power. It divides the world into an affluent, industrialized North and a poor, underdeveloped South. The North-South divide stands as an alternative to theories of globalization.

History
The term 'Third World' came into parlance in the second half of the twentieth century. It originated in a 1952 article by Alfred Sauvy entitled "Trois Mondes, Une Planète." Early definitions of the Third World emphasized its exclusion from the East-West conflict of the Cold War as well as the ex-colonial status and poverty of the nations it comprised. Efforts to mobilize the Third World as an autonomous political entity were undertaken. The 1955 Bandung Conference was an early meeting of Third World states in which an alternative to alignment with either the Eastern or Western Blocs was promoted. Following this, the first Non-Aligned Summit was organized in 1961. Contemporaneously, a mode of economic criticism which separated the world economy into "core" and "periphery" was developed and given expression in a project for political reform which "moved the terms 'North' and 'South' into the international political lexicon." In 1973, the pursuit of a New International Economic Order which was to be negotiated between the North and South was initiated at the Non-Aligned Summit held in Algiers. Also in 1973, the oil embargo initiated by Arab OPEC countries as a result of the Yom Kippur War caused an increase in world oil prices, with prices continuing to rise throughout the decade. This contributed to a worldwide recession which resulted in industrialized nations increasing economically protectionist policies and contributing less aid to the less developed countries of the South. The slack was taken up by Western banks, which provided substantial loans to Third World countries. However, many of these countries were not able to pay back their debt, which led the IMF to extend further loans to them on the condition that they undertake certain liberalizing. reforms. This policy, which came to be known as structural adjustment, and was institutionalized by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and Western governments, represented a break from the Keynesian approach to foreign aid which had been the norm from the end of the Second World War. After 1987, reports on the negative social impacts that structural adjustment policies had had on affected developing nations led IFIs to supplement structural adjustment policies with targeted anti-poverty projects.

Theories explaining the divide
The development disparity between the North and the South has sometimes been explained in historical terms. Dependency theory looks back on the patterns of colonial relations which persisted between the North and South and emphasizes how colonized territories tended to be impoverished by those relations. Theorists of this school maintain that the economies of ex-colonial states remain oriented towards serving external rather than internal demand, and that development regimes undertaken in this context have tended to reproduce in underdeveloped countries the pronounced class hierarchies found in industrialized countries while maintaining higher levels of poverty. Dependency theory is closely intertwined with Latin American Structuralism, the only school of development economics emerging from the Global South to be affiliated with a national research institute and to receive support from national banks and finance ministries. The Structuralists defined dependency as an inability of a nation's economy to complete the cycle of capital accumulation without reliance on an outside economy. More specifically, peripheral nations were perceived as primary resource exporters reliant on core economies for manufactured goods. This led the Structuralists to advocate for import-substitution industrialization policies which aimed to replace manufactured imports with domestically made products.

New Economic Geography explains development disparities in terms of the physical organization of industry, arguing that firms tend to cluster in order benefit from economies of scale and increase productivity which leads ultimately to an increase in wages. The North has more firm clustering than the South, making its industries more competitive. It is argued that only when wages in the North reach a certain height, will it become more profitable for firms to operate in the South, allowing clustering to begin.

Challenges
The accuracy of the North-South divide has been challenged on a number of grounds. Firstly, differences in the political, economic and demographic make-up of countries tend to complicate the idea of a monolithic South. Globalization has also challenged the notion of two distinct economic spheres. Following the liberalization of post-Mao China initiated in 1978, growing regional cooperation between the national economies of Asia has led to the growing decentralization of the North as the main economic power. The economic status of the South has also been fractured. As of 2015, all but roughly the bottom 60 nations of the Global South were thought to be gaining on the North in terms of income, diversification, and participation in the world market. Globalization has largely displaced the North-South divide as the theoretical underpinning of the development efforts of international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and various United Nations affiliated agencies, though these groups differ in their perceptions of the relationship between globalization and inequality. Yet some remain critical of the accuracy of globalization as a model of the world economy, emphasizing the enduring centrality of nation-states in world politics and the prominence of regional trade relations.

Peer Review: Financial Task Force on Money Laundering: Members of FAFT
The opening paragraph of your section of the article is very good at both introducing the topic of FAFT membership and elaborating on what that membership means. This makes your draft much more straightforward and easy to understand than what is present in the published article. However, the source you cited for this section states that there are currently 38 member countries of FAFT, rather than 36 as you have stated was the case in 2018. It seems that this may be to contextualize the first sentence of the "Observers of FATF" section which, in my opinion, is not needed. I also noticed two grammatical errors in your draft. The first is in the opening section where there is an unnecessary comma after the 'and' which follows "counter-measures" and a semi-colon. The second is in the second sentence of the paragraph under the "Associate Members of FAFT" heading where the word questionnaire should be plural. The last section is very strong in that it states outright what the organizations listed are and what they do. I think that the Associate Members section would be improved by reflecting the same format. As it is, this section does not make it clear that the associates are organizations because prior to this the only acting subjects you had written of were either member nations or FAFT as a whole. As a result, the list and the preceding text appear dissonant. Your draft section makes effective use of the two official sources. While you might choose to incorporate other sources, it doesn't seem strictly necessary. Good work overall.