Alfred Sauvy: Encyclopedia - Alfred Sauvy

Alfred Sauvy

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:

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.

Alfred Sauvy - Biography

Born in Villeneuve de la Raho (Eastern Pyrenean) and educated at the École Polytechnique, Alfred Sauvy worked at the Statistique Générale of France until 1937. 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 turn itself 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.

Alfred Sauvy - His work

• . (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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Alfred Sauvy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki