Belindia
Belindia proper noun: a hypothetical country combining traits of both Belgium and India.
Proper noun
Belindia
- A hypothetical country combining traits of both Belgium and India.
- In Belindia more than a fifth of the overall population simply lacked the means to purchase adequate food. In Belindia, moreover, the richest 20 percent of the population at the beginning of the '90s earned 32.5 times as much as the poorest 20 percent, “an inequality greater even than Bangladesh's.”2010, Fredrick B. Pike, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos, University of Texas Press, →ISBN
- Brazil has become Belindia, a term made up in the 1970s by economist Edmar Lisboa Bacha, to describe a fictitious country made up of Belgium and India, with the laws and taxes of a small rich state, and the social reality of a large, poor nation.2022 January 26, Naiara Galarraga Gortázar, “Nearly 20 years on since famous snapshot of inequality in Brazil, little has changed”, in El País
Origin of Belindia
Blend of Belgium + India, coined by Brazilian economist Edmar Bacha in the 1970s.
Questions about Belindia
- What does Belindia mean?
- Belindia means a hypothetical country combining traits of both Belgium and India.
- What part of speech is Belindia?
- Belindia is a proper noun.
Words near Belindia in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Belindia (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “Belindia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/belindia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
