Short answers, pulled from the story.
Common criteria include gross domestic product per capita, level of industrialisation, and the Human Development Index, which combines national income with measures of life expectancy and education. Different organisations prioritise different measures, so no single universal standard exists.
Norway has held the highest HDI score most frequently since 1990, leading from 2001-2006 and 2009-2019. The top HDI value in the 2023 rankings was 0.972.
The IMF officially lists 43 countries and territories as advanced economies. An additional six microstates and dependencies are noted by the CIA as probable inclusions, with San Marino added in 2012, Andorra in 2021, and Liechtenstein in 2025.
According to the IMF, advanced economies account for 57.3 percent of global GDP based on nominal value and 41.1 percent based on purchasing power parity.
UNIDO first implemented its high-income industrial economies classification in 2022. The category covers 48 countries and one territory, assessed on manufacturing value added per capita, historical employment share, and the quality of exports.
Mathis Wackernagel criticised the binary labeling of countries as neither descriptive nor explanatory, calling it a thoughtless endorsement of GDP fetish. He argued that there are over 200 countries, each unique, rather than two distinct types.