"The Day the World Gets 'Round" is a song by the English musician George Harrison, released on his 1973 album Living in the Material World. Harrison was inspired to write the song following the successful Concert for Bangladesh shows, which were held in New York on 1 August 1971 as a benefit for refugees from the country formerly known as East Pakistan. The lyrics reflect his disappointment that such a humanitarian aid project was necessary, given the abundance of resources available across the planet, and his belief that if all individuals were more spiritually aware, there would be no suffering in the world. Adding to Harrison's frustration while writing the song, the aid project became embroiled in financial problems, as commercial concerns delayed the release of the Concert for Bangladesh album, and government tax departments failed to embrace the goodwill inherent in the venture.

Harrison recorded "The Day the World Gets 'Round" in England between October 1972 and March 1973. The recording features an orchestral arrangement by John Barham and a similarly well-regarded vocal performance from Harrison. The other contributing musicians were Nicky Hopkins, Klaus Voormann, Ringo Starr and Jim Keltner. Reviewers have described the composition variously as a protest song, a devotional prayer, and a counterpart to John Lennon's peace anthem "Imagine".

As with all the new songs released on Living in the Material World, Harrison donated his publishing royalties from the track to the Material World Charitable Foundation, an organisation he set up to avoid the tax problems that had befallen his Bangladesh relief effort. The song typifies Harrison's ideal for a world unencumbered by national, religious or cultural delineation. In 2009, Voormann and Yusuf Islam covered "The Day the World Gets 'Round" and released it as a single to benefit children in war-torn Gaza.

In his 1980 autobiography, I, Me, Mine, George Harrison describes the period following the two Concert for Bangladesh shows as "very emotional". The concerts took place at Madison Square Garden, New York, on 1 August 1971, as the first part of his fundraising program for the 8–10 million refugees of the Bangladesh Liberation War. The generosity of all the participants, together with the response from the general public, encouraged Harrison to feel "very positive about certain things". At the same time, the fact that it had fallen to musicians such as himself and concert instigator Ravi Shankar to address the issue left Harrison "slightly enraged", given the wealth of resources available to governments around the globe. Author Gary Tillery writes that, through his humanitarian gesture, Harrison had "changed the perception" of rock musicians, "making it clear they could be good world citizens too", while music critic Mikal Gilmore has noted of Harrison's "cautious yet optimistic and tender" worldview: "[it] stood in stark contrast to the ugly dissolution of the Beatles and the defeated idealism that then characterised so much of rock & roll culture." The day after the Madison Square Garden concerts, Harrison began writing the song "The Day the World Gets 'Round", having stayed in New York to work with producer Phil Spector on the proposed live album of the event.

Harrison found frustration in this next phase of the Bangladesh project, as the various record companies associated with the concerts' performers attempted to profit from the forthcoming release. Chief among these was the Beatles' US distributor, Capitol Records, who delayed issuing the album in the hope of negotiating a royalty rate to cover what they perceived as high distribution costs for the boxed three-record set. Harrison was resolute that Capitol should absorb the costs, just as the Beatles' Apple record label had already paid for the album's lavish packaging and full-colour booklet. All those involved with the concerts and post-production on the live album had given their services for free, in keeping with Harrison's hope that, in Tillery's words: "Every penny of income – from the gate receipts to the profits from an album and a film – would go toward alleviating the suffering."

By early October 1971, bootleg recordings of the concerts were available in New York, potentially denying funds to the refugees. On 23 November, Harrison's exasperation with the situation saw him raging against Capitol president Bhaskar Menon during a late-night television interview with Dick Cavett, and threatening to take the album to a rival label. Menon then backed down, ceding much of the distribution rights to Columbia/CBS, whose artist Bob Dylan had made a successful comeback at the Concert for Bangladesh. Further delaying the release until well into December, wholesalers objected to Apple's financial terms, which ensured that wholesalers and retailers could make little profit on each copy shipped. Ignoring the spirit behind the release, author Peter Lavezzoli writes, some US retailers "engaged in shameless price gouging".

Of greater detriment to the project in the long term, Harrison's business manager, Allen Klein, had neglected to register the concerts as UNICEF fundraising benefits before they had taken place. As a result, the American and British tax departments were demanding a share of the proceeds from the live album and Saul Swimmer's concert film, ignoring Harrison's appeals that an exception be made in the case of this humanitarian disaster. Until India's defeat of Pakistan on 16 December, America continued to supply arms and financial aid to the Pakistani army, led by General Yahya Khan, despite reports of genocide being committed against the Bangladeshis. In reply to a New Yorker's offer to start a petition to make the US Treasury scrap its tax on the Concert for Bangladesh album, Harrison wrote: "Until the [politicians] become human, we must do our service to others without their help."

Although Rolling Stone and other countercultural publications lauded the Bangladesh concerts as proof that "the Utopian spirit of the Sixties was still flickering", in the words of author Nicholas Schaffner, Harrison addressed, in "The Day the World Gets 'Round", the corporate greed and governmental apathy he had encountered. While staging the concerts Harrison had made a point of distancing himself from the politics behind the war in what was formerly known as East Pakistan, and he similarly advocated peace activist Swami Vishnudevananda's proposal for Planet Earth passports – whereby "[one truth] underlies all nations, all cultures, all colours, all races, all religions". Referring to the song and the moral responsibility of wealthy Western nations, he says in I, Me, Mine: "If everyone would wake-up and do even a little, there could be no misery in the world."