The definition of a backward country is one where you can't get green tea.

ECONOMIST: Business travel

Having lived in the 1940s and 1950s, just after the defeated Japanese left a poverty stricken Singapore, I have seen the struggles during the development of my then backward country to a modern metropolis.

CNN: LETTERS AND COMMENT

Russia, they say, is too big and too backward to be governed exactly like a western country.

ECONOMIST: A survey of Russia: A reconditioned model | The

Such a policy seems to be taking this country 100 steps backward in time.

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Lawfare's effectiveness lies in the fact that ours is a country so strongly committed to the rule of law that it will often bend over backward to appease charges of illegality - however specious - to the detriment of its own interests.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center For Security Policy

Now that Saddam Hussein has once again turned his pathetically impoverished country into a kitchen for poisons and a stage for his grandiosity, it is time to look backward and up.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Giving Saddam Space

Back then, anyone could tell that Japan was a backward, resource-poor nation going nowhere - and Brazil, with its all its natural wealth, was the country of the future.

BBC: Brazil: No reverso