Developing Countries

6 Key excerpts on "Developing Countries"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Applied International Economics

  • W. Charles Sawyer, Richard L. Sprinkle(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  economic development in more detail and examine some aspects of the universe of countries known as the developing economies. As we will see, the critical factor for these countries is their rate of economic growth. In the second part of the chapter, we will discuss the basic aspects of the theory of economic growth. The third part of the chapter shows how international trade can be used to enhance economic growth. This is followed by a discussion of the various strategies that have been used by Developing Countries to enhance their economic growth. The final section deals with the role of developed-country governments and international organizations in their efforts to increase economic growth in Developing Countries.

  THE Developing Countries

  In this section, some of the aspects of economic development and the Developing Countries that were omitted in Chapter 1 are discussed. First, we need to describe the concept of economic development. Second, we need to take a closer look at the economics and geography of the Developing Countries. From there, we will be able to begin to understand why economic growth is so important and how international trade can enhance economic development.

  Economic development

  Economic development is one of those terms that everyone intuitively understands, for some countries are relatively rich and others are relatively poor. However, these concepts need to be refined somewhat. Economic development is defined as a goal that each country attempts to achieve. The goal of economic development is the attainment of a standard of living roughly equivalent to that of the average citizen in a developed country. A way to measure the average income of individuals within a country is using GDP per capita. However, this measurement is really just a proxy for a variety of factors. In most of the world’s countries, low GDP per capita is associated with a host of other factors that reduce the quality of life. In the poorest countries there is pervasive malnutrition and chronically poor housing. The first goal of economic development is the alleviation of these dire conditions for billions of people. Beyond basic food and housing, the lack of access to basic health care is equally a threat to the lives of billions of people. In many cases, this lack of health care is more acute because of the lack of basic infrastructure to provide amenities such as clean water that can drastically reduce the standard of living. As we saw in Chapter 4

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Management

  A Developing Country Perspective

  • Betty Jane Punnett(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Over time the terminology used for development has varied. In the early 1900s, the poorer countries were often referred to as “traditional” and the richer ones as “modern”. In the mid-1900s the poorer countries were referred to as “underdeveloped” or “less developed countries” (LDCs); sometimes they were referred to as the “third world” (in contrast to the first, rich world, and the second, communist world), and sometimes a distinction was drawn between the North (where most rich countries are) and the South (where most poor countries are). Reflecting the level of industrialization that accompanies development, sometimes the richer countries have been referred to as industrialized or advanced countries. More recently, the terms that have become popular are Developing Countries, transition economies – the countries of East–central Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – and emerging markets (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2006). As some of the highest-income countries have become heavily reliant on services (finance, research and development, medical services and so on) rather than manufacturing, these countries are sometimes now be referred to as post-industrial countries. In this chapter developed and developing are used, because these are terms that are likely to be familiar to most readers. In the following sections, some of the terms used are discussed in more detail.

  Traditional and Modern

  The poorer countries were considered to be traditional in their approaches to government, economics and so on – that is, they used approaches which were considered “old fashioned”. The richer countries, in contrast, were believed to have adopted modern approaches, such as democracy and free markets. Traditional countries were seen as being held back by their adherence to traditional ways, whereas modern countries progressed and advanced because of their adoption of new and innovative – modern – ideas and ways of behaving. At the extreme, traditional countries were considered backward and modern countries advanced.

  Underdeveloped Countries and LDCs

  Poorer, Developing Countries were often called “underdeveloped” some fifty years ago. This terminology has been described as a carryover of colonial condescension and was changed to “less developed countries” (LDCs) in order to be less demeaning. This term has also been considered negative and is seldom now used for the Developing Countries as a group. The term LDC now describes the “least developed countries,” the poorest nations in the world, which receive particular development attention from the United Nations.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Language of Global Development

  • Marcin Wojciech Solarz(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Some authors who criticize the term ‘Developing Countries’ also argue that it poorly reflects and describes reality because it has a purely formal character, at least in the context of some international institutions. This objection is based on a rather unfortunate policy decision – probably justified at a political and diplomatic level, but unacceptable from a scientific perspective – that for example the World Trade Organization does not categorize a country as a developing nation on the basis of more or less accurate and objective criteria, but automatically, based on the unilateral declaration of the country concerned (although other WTO members can in fact challenge the decision). In practice, this means that the countries of the South ‘by choice’ may not be identical with the Third World identified on the basis of criteria allowing the international community to be divided according to achieved levels of development. And, in fact, these two sets of countries are not identical – for example, during the Cold War, Yugoslavia and Romania, on balance, only belonged to the group of ‘declarative’ Developing Countries (Prokopczuk 1983; Deszczyński 2001). Such an ‘institutional’ approach to determining ‘Developing Countries’ within the framework of the World Trade Organization has led to the category being considered ‘very fuzzy’ (Deubel 2008: 465). But the problem here is not so much the concept itself as the criteria for determining which countries qualify as belonging to the group of ‘developing nations’, which, in essence, means consent to the domination of diplomatic and practical–political priorities over development considerations.

  Discussion of the category ‘Developing Countries’ has led to other problems being raised. For example, some authors consider the meaning of the term ‘developed country’ to be unclear, which obviously has significant consequences for how ‘Developing Countries’ is understood (Haynes 2002). The ambiguity of the concept of development as a whole has also been commented on (Prokopczuk 1983; Haynes 2002). In addition, it has been argued that the term ‘Developing Countries’ is ultimately meaningless, since every country in the world has development as a key item on its agenda (Sauvy 1982). The question has also been posed as to whether the (at times, drastic) socioeconomic gaps that exist both in developing and developed countries are not an additional source of difficulty of a terminological nature for the understanding and use of both concepts (Haynes 2002).

  In the mid-1970s, at a conference in Algiers, economists from Africa, Latin America and Asia apparently agreed that it was necessary give up the fiction of the term ‘Developing Countries’ and use the name ‘Third World’, which, though imprecise, was, all things considered, burdened with fewer defects (Giełżyński 1984; Malendowski 1998b; Deszczyński 2001). However, this agreement, if it did ever really occur, was never anything more than a dead letter, as the term ‘Developing Countries’ is still one of the most common terms used to designate underdeveloped countries. J. Haynes (2002) pointed out that justification for the use of this term is, in particular, the fact that it is favoured by most of the countries to which the name can be applied, as well as by worldwide institutions such as the UN.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Development Economics

  • Debraj Ray(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Figure 2.15 reveals.

  We summarize: Developing Countries are likely to have a high ratio of primary goods in their total exports, but as far as imports are concerned, there is significantly less variation.

  2.6. Summary

  We began with a discussion of what the term economic development might mean. It is a multifaceted concept, embodying not just income and its growth, but also achievements on other fronts: reductions in infant mortality, higher life expectancy, advances in literacy rates, widespread access to medical and health services, and so on. Per capita income is sometimes used as an (incomplete) indicator for overall economic development, but should not be identified conceptually with development in the broader sense.

  We turned next to per capita income data for countries. Using exchange rates to convert local currencies into dollars, we obtained per capita income evaluated according to the exchange rate method . The disparities across countries is enormous. Some of this disparity is due to underreporting of income, but a far more serious problem arises from the fact that price levels are systematically different across countries: dollar prices for nontraded goods and services tend to be lower in Developing Countries. The purchasing power parity method attempts to correct for this by constructing international prices that are used to estimate national incomes. Cross-country disparities in per capita income are then smaller, but still large: the richest 5% of the world’s nations averaged a per capita income that was about twenty-nine times the corresponding figure for the poorest 5%, over the period 1960–85.

  There have been substantial changes in incomes for many countries. The meteoric rise of East Asia is a case to be noted. This case is contrasted with the fact that much of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa languished during the 1980s. Thus, although the world distribution of income remained fairly unchanged in relative terms, there was plenty of movement within that distribution. However, there is evidence that a history of underdevelopment or extreme poverty feeds on itself. Using mobility matrices

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  A Reappraisal of Economic Development

  Perspectives for Cooperative Research

  • Jerome Bruner(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  I do not make these observations as a preface to an exegesis on research methodology for underdeveloped countries. Rather they are intended to prepare the way for a confession of my preference for the macrocosraic approach. The remarks that follow, therefore, should be compensated for this bias.

  My bias, no doubt, is appropriate, for the subject of this morning’s discussion. “Underdeveloped Countries in the World Economy” is nothing if not a broad topic. Indeed I suspect that it is a kind of academic come-on designed to trap the wary professor. After all, who will admit he doesn’t have something to say about it?

  Let me start by paying my respects to economics. In recent years it has been belabored, both inside and outside the ranks, for failing to solve the enigma of development. The realization that the nonWestern world has not responded to economic parameters in the same manner as the Western world in its initial industrialization has somehow been disillusioning; the tools of economic analysis no longer seem quite so powerful as they did when confined to their indigenous habitat.

  Yet without economics it would have been impossible to map the terrain of the underdeveloped countries. The innovations of the 1930’s, especially in the realm of macroeconomics, have subsequently borne fruit in the measures of income and product by which we now can establish rough approximations of stages or degrees of development. It goes without saying that we never can have enough data of this sort. It is essential for knowing how we stand, whether we have moved forward or backward, and for estimating the magnitude of the tasks before us.

  Moreover, economic models at least form a skeletal framework to which one may attach the institutional flesh, sinew, and muscle essential for its motion, Analysis of saving, investment, and technological change, for example, highlights the role of the entrepreneur in development. If he has, in point of fact, not been sufficiently active in the underdeveloped countries, or has not labored in an environment conducive to growth projects, economics can hardly be held responsible.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The New Economics Of The Less Developed Countries

  Changing Perceptions In The North-south Dialogue

  • Nake Kamrany(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  IIThe Outlook for Developing Countries John Shilling and Nicholas Carter International Bank for Reconstruction and Development

  Not since the hopeful period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the first U.N. Decade of Development program was announced, has so much attention and concern been focused on Developing Countries. The tone, however, has changed from the spirit of cooperation and progress that characterized that earlier period to one of recrimination and conflict. This reversal of attititude and rhetoric follows a world economic crisis precipitated by the combination of sharp world-wide price increases and then a sharp fall in demand for least developed countries’ exports in the wake of the deep recession in the developed countries. Although reflecting disillusionment at the very partial achievement of earlier goals for aid and development, the current pessimistic mood is much more a result of world-wide changes in perceptions than it is of fundamental changes in the situation of the Developing Countries. This is not to diminish the severity of the shock absorbed by the Developing Countries as a whole, but for most it has been only one of several short-run set-backs, and for a few it has even been a net benefit.

  In strict economic terms, the Developing Countries suffered less immediate loss in income and consumption growth than did the developed countries? however, the onset of the crisis and the reaction to it served to emphasize the huge disparities of wealth and income that have increased over the past decade, and the relative powerlessness of most Developing Countries to control many factors directly affecting their economic well-being. Many Developing Countries have taken the necessary domestic policy actions to adjust to the new external conditions; at the same time, they have also begun a more strident political dialogue with the developed countries aimed at achieving a greater role in international economic decision making and a more favorable distribution of resources - encouraged in large part by the example of OPEC.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book