Global Patterns of Economic Development
- Development is a process of positive change where a country becomes wealthier and more technologically advanced
- It refers to positive changes in people’s quality of life, such as happiness, educational opportunities, increased incomes, human rights, access to clean water and healthier living conditions
- There are different strands of development:
- Environmental - where natural environments are improved or restored
- Political - where governments become stable and effective
- Social - standards of living, access to health care, education, clean water, housing and leisure are improved
- Economic - income, employment and industry is increased
Measuring Development
- Traditionally, measurements would focus on wealth, using indicators such as:
- GDP - Gross domestic product is the total value of the economy per year
- GNI - Gross national income is the total value of goods and services produced in a country per year
- The poverty line - the percentage of people who earn less than $2.15 per day as set by the World Bank in 2022 (up from $1.90 per day in 2015)
- This divided countries into rich or poor, but did not take into account the scale or change of wealth a country can move through
- The World Bank categorises economies into income groupings per capita, in U.S. dollars:
- Low income countries (LICs) where average earnings are $1,135 or less
- Middle income countries (MICs) - these are split into lower middle income of between $1,136 and $4,465 and upper middle income of between $4,466 and $13,845
- High income countries (HICs) where average earnings are $13,846 or more
- Globally there is an uneven distribution of high, middle and low income countries
- With 8 billion people in the world:
- “Around 10% of the world’s population live in countries where the average income per person is less than $2 a day. Around 20% are in high-income countries. The majority, around 70%, live in middle-income countries - Gapminder 2023”
World Bank classification of countries by income groups 2021
Classification is based on a country’s GNI per capita and has changed over time
- Most HICs are found in the northern hemisphere and include countries such as Canada, Japan, Spain, UK and Japan
- However, there are anomalies such as Chile, Australia, Uruguay and New Zealand, which are classified as a high income countries, but are located in the southern hemisphere and Haiti is the only country in North America that is classified as low income
- Most LICs are found between the tropics and concentrated within Africa, along with some parts of Asia
- MICs vary by:
- Region
- Size - physical and population numbers
- Income levels
- E.g. Belize and the Marshall Islands have small populations, whereas the five BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa account for 27% of the world's land surface with 42% of the global population. China and India together account for approximately one-third of the world's population and are increasingly influential players in the global economy and Russia is the largest country by land mass at 11%
