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Alfred Sauvy (1898-1990) was a demographer, anthropologist and historian of the French economy. Sauvy coined the term Third World (Tiers Monde) in reference to the underdeveloped countries in an article published in the French magazine L'Observateur on August 14, 1952. At the end of the article Sauvy said:

"...car enfin, ce Tiers Monde ignoré, exploité, méprisé comme le Tiers Etat, veut lui aussi, être quelque chose"

"...because at the end this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to become something too".

In using the expression Third World here he was paraphrasing Sieyès's famous sentence about the Third Estate during the French Revolution. Sauvy assimilated then the capitalist First World to the nobility and the communist Second World to the clergy.

Born in Villeneuve de la Raho (Pyrénées-Orientales) and educated at the École Polytechnique, Alfred Sauvy worked at the Statistique Générale of France until 1937. He took part in the X-Crise Group. In 1938, Paul Reynaud called him to deal with economical issues until the war arrived in 1939. During the occupation Sauvy participated in the edition of the Bulletin Rouge-Brique, a non-censored pamphlet. After the war, de Gaulle named him as the General Secretary to the Family and the Population but Sauvy decided to devote himself towards demography. He became director of the INED (National Institute of Demographic Studies) and simultaneously represented France to the commission of Statistics and Population of the United Nations. He wrote for Le Monde until his decease in October 1990.

• . (Collection Thémis -Sciences sociales)
• 1977 Coût et valeur de la vie humaine -- Paris : Hermann, 210 p.
• 1980 La machine et le chômage : les progrès techniques et l'emploi -- Paris : Dunod/Bordas, 320 p.
• 1984 Le travail noir et l'économie de demain -- Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 304 p.
• 1985 De la rumeur à l'histoire -- Paris : Dunod, 304 p.
• 1990 La terre et les hommes : le monde où il va, le monde d'où il vient -- Paris : Economica, 187 p.

• Martínez Coll, Juan Carlos (2001): Grandes Economistas, [1] February 22, 2004