10.1 An Uneven World

• Limited financial resources

  • Little or no government inspection, and builders sometimes succumbed to the temptation to skimp on construction quality

• Any view of the contemporary world shows contrast from place to place in levels of economic development and people’s material well-being

10.2 Dividing the Continuum: Defining Development

• Countries display different levels of development

• Developing suggests changes in traditional

  • Social

  • Culture

  • Political

    • This is to help resemble how it is done in those countries and economics

• Third world

  • Applied to developed countries as a group sometimes

  • Used to be a political reference before

10.3 Measures of Development

• GNP

  • Gross national product

• PPP

  • Purchasing power parity

• GNI

  • Gross national income

  • Countries with the highest GNI are in northwestern Europe

• World Bank divides the world’s countries into low-income, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income categories

• Energy Consumption per Capita

  • Used as another common measure for technological advancements

  • Industrialized countries use about 10 times more energy on a per capita basis than developing economies do

  • Advanced countries developed their economic strength through the use of cheap, energy-dense fossil fuels and their application to industrial processes]

• Percentage of the Workforce Engaged in Agriculture

  • High percentage of employment in agriculture

    • This is almost invariably associated with subsistence agriculture, low per capita gross national income, and low energy consumption

  • When a labor force is primarily engaged in subsistence agriculture there is limited capital accumulation or national economic growth

• Food Security and Nutrition

  • Long-term chronic undernourishment is a frequent outcome of poverty

  • Hunger kills more people each year than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined

  • Parts of Western Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, particularly South Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, and Syria, have seen rising undernourishment due to terrorism, civil war, and climate shocks

  • WHO estimates that more than 2 billion people worldwide suffer from some form of micronutrient malnutrition

    • This leads to

      • Infant and child mortality

      • Impaired physical

      • Mental development

      • Weakened immune responses

• Education

  • A literate, educated labor force is essential to take advantage of advanced technology

  • In the poorest societies, half or more of adults are illiterate

    • This problem stems in part from a national poverty

  • Family poverty makes tuition fees prohibitive and keeps millions of school-age children in full-time work

  • A lot of school-age children not enrolled in school are found in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia

  • Africa increased the percentage in school from 52 percent to 80 percent

  • Gender gap in education has been closing in recent decades, but it still is apparent in Africa

• Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation

  • The WHO estimates that 525,000 children die each year due to diarrheal diseases

  • Fecal contamination causes many water-borne diarrheal diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever

  • Diarrheal diseases have a disproportionate effect on the very young and contribute to malnutrition and stunted growth

  • About 660 million people lacked a dependable sanitary supply of water

• Health

  • Less-developed world, vast numbers of people are effectively denied the services of physicians

  • Shortage of doctors is a crisis in many sub-Saharan African, Central American, and South Asian countries

  • There are simply too few trained health professionals to serve the needs of expanding populations

  • Rural clinics are few in number and are far apart

• Technology

  • The totality of tools and methods used by a culture group to produce items for subsistence and comfort

  • Technology gap has always existed between hearths of innovation at the core and the periphery

    • It widened with the Industrial Revolution

    • Is continuing to grow with

      • Innovations in railroads

      • Steelmaking

      • Electrical engineering

      • Chemistry

      • Automobiles

      • Petrochemicals

      • Computers

      • Information and communications technologies

  • Technology transfer is the deliberate introduction of technologies and processes that mark the more advanced countries

10.4 Explanations of Development and Underdevelopment

• Physical geography

  • Poverty and underdevelopment are tropical conditions

  • Rich countries are mostly in temperate climate zones

  • The world’s poorest states are mostly located in tropical latitudes

  • Brazilians of the southeastern temperate highlands have average incomes several times higher than Amazonia

  • Annual average incomes of Mexicans of the temperate north far exceed those of the southern Yucatán

  • Australians of the tropical north are poorer than Australians of the temperate south

• The Slave Trade and Colonialism

  • The 500-year history of colonialism played a vital role in shaping the political and economic geography

    • Laid the foundation for the present-day economic differences among countries

    • Allowed European countries to gain an initial economic advantage by gaining control of

      • Territory

      • Natural resources

      • Labor

      • Markets

• Modernization Theory

  • Understanding of the development process

  • Goes back to when the optimism of the post–World War II era, when the United States began working with European countries and Japan to reconstruct both their war-damaged economies and the global economic order

  • Drew upon sociological and economic theories and shaped the original thinking about development in Western countries

  • Begins by arranging all societies on a continuum with traditional on one end and modern on the other

• The Core-Periphery Model

  • Inside developing countries, which are undergoing modernization there often includes a modern core area of capitalist production integrated with the global economy alongside a traditional periphery with subsistence wages

  • Within market economies, income disparities tend to be reduced as developmental levels increase

  • Core and periphery are linked parts of a wider system

    • One section of a country experiences accelerated economic development

      • Becomes increasingly attractive for investors, entrepreneurs, and migrants

• Dependency Theory

  • Emerged from dissatisfaction with modernization theory and development programs as they were applied to regions such as Latin America

  • Claimed that the development of the advanced core nations depended upon the underdevelopment of the peripheral nations

  • Neocolonialism is said to exist even after legal independence in which economic and even political control is exercised by developed states over the economies and societies of independent countries of the underdeveloped world

  • Support for dependency theory comes from the growing gap between the world’s poorest and richest countries

• World Systems Theory

  • Extends the core-periphery model to the entire capitalist global world economy

  • Core-periphery contrasts are discerned between, particularly, Western Europe, Japan, and the United States

10.5 Strategies for Development

• New Directions in Development

  • Neoliberal globalization

    • Market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy

  • Development Prospects

    • Developing countries remain locked in one of the first two stages of his model, unable to achieve the takeoff to self-sustained growth despite importing technology and attracting foreign aid investment funds from the more developed world

    • Newly industrializing countries such as China lead the world in economic growth

  • Challenges and Opportunities Facing Developing Countries

    • Foreign Debt

      • To develop many developing countries borrowed heavily in the 1960s and 1970s

      • Money was spent on hydroelectric dams, power plants, ports, and other large, government-directed development projects

      • Loans were refinanced during structural adjustment but not forgiven

      • Neoliberal reforms put in place did not stimulate economic growth sufficient to pay down debts

    • Land Ownership

      • Resolving issues of land ownership is critical to improving the lives of the poorest residents

      • Settlements built without registered land ownership are vulnerable to slum clearance and difficult to improve

      • Will not actually capture the increased value unless they have legal title to the property

10.6 Gender Inequality

• GNI per capita takes no account of the sex and age structures of the societies examined

• Women spend more hours per day working than do men in developed regions

• Women’s work hours exceed men’s by 30 percent and may involve at least as the arduous or even heavier physical labor

• Women are paid less than men for comparable employment everywhere, but in most world regions the percentage of economically active women holding wage or salaried positions is about equal to the rate for men

10.7 Alternative Measures of Development and Well-Being

• Achievement of development must also be seen in terms of individual and collective well-being

• Noneconomic criteria are among the evidence of comparative developmental level that is sought in composite statistics

• HDI reflects the program’s conviction that the important human aspirations are leading a long and healthy life, receiving adequate education, and having access to economic resources sufficient for a high quality of life

• UNDP has also developed a measure of poverty in its Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

• UN’s Gender Development Index (GDI) simply computes the HDI for women and men separately and then compares them

• Men tend to score higher than women on the HDI

• South Asia has the lowest GDI at 0.822