Developing country

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Developing country is a term that appears in textbooks, international treaties, and UN reports, but no one can fully agree on what it means. The World Bank classifies the world's economies into four groups based on gross national income per capita, yet in 2015 it announced it would phase out the very category of "developing world" altogether. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued the divide between developed and developing is largely a 20th-century phenomenon. The late global health expert Hans Rosling called the concept outdated, pointing out that the vast majority of countries are middle-income rather than neatly sorted into rich and poor. What holds the label together, then, and what falls apart when you look closely? The story runs through colonial histories, climate injustice, slum cities, contested statistics, and the politics of self-declaration at the World Trade Organization.

• 2. The Label and Its Critics

  ›

  Walter Rodney, the historian and academic, raised one of the earliest published objections to the terms "developing" and "underdeveloped" in 1973, comparing economic, social, and political conditions between the United States and countries in Africa and Asia. His concern pointed to something structural: calling a country "developing" can imply inferiority while assuming every nation desires to follow the Western model of economic development. Countries such as Cuba and Bhutan have explicitly chosen not to follow that model, and alternative measures like gross national happiness have been proposed as indicators in their place.

  Mathis Wackernagel, sustainability expert and founder of the Global Footprint Network, describes the binary labeling of countries as "neither descriptive nor explanatory" and calls the developed-versus-developing framing "a thoughtless and destructive endorsement of GDP fetish." Rosling and Wackernagel both argue there are not two types of countries but over 200, each facing the same laws of nature yet carrying unique histories. The term "Global South" has grown in use since about 2004 as an alternative framing; it explicitly references interconnected histories of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic change rather than a simple income ranking.

  At the World Trade Organization, the classification carries direct financial consequences. The WTO generally accepts any country's self-declared developing status, which entitles it to preferential treatment. Countries including Brunei, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Macao, Qatar, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates have been cited and criticized for claiming that status despite meeting developed-country benchmarks by nearly every economic metric.

• 3. Measuring Development

  ›

  For the 2022 fiscal year, the World Bank set the threshold for a low-income country at a gross national income per capita below 1,045 US dollars. A lower-middle-income country falls between 1,046 and 4,095 dollars, upper-middle income between 4,096 and 12,695 dollars, and high income above 12,696 dollars. These thresholds are recalibrated each year on the 1st of July using the Atlas method.

  The United Nations built the Human Development Index as a compound measure pulling together income per capita, life expectancy, literacy, and other indicators, specifically to capture what GDP alone misses. The UN also set Millennium Development Goals and, after those ended in 2015, replaced them with 17 Sustainable Development Goals targeting the year 2030. The IMF takes a narrower approach, focusing solely on financial integration and stability rather than broader social development, a difference that has produced anomalies: several European countries received an immediate IMF upgrade to "developed economy" status after adopting the Euro, on the basis of greater financial integration and without consideration of other social or economic factors.

  Countries with roughly 50 percent of economic output coming from the manufacturing sector have tended to show substantial growth, and those with a strong services sector show higher development rates as well. These sectoral shifts are considered important secondary indicators alongside the headline income figures.

• 4. Colonial Legacies and Economic Exploitation

  ›

  Many developing countries gained full self-determination and democratic governance only in the second half of the 20th century, after decades under European imperial rule. Independence brought urgent needs for infrastructure, industry, and economic stability, which pushed many newly independent nations toward heavy reliance on foreign investment. That investment has frequently been predatory in character, channeling raw materials toward wealthy nations and limiting the ability of resource-rich developing countries to benefit from their own natural assets.

  Brands and companies based in wealthier regions have established manufacturing in lower-wage countries, taking advantage of desperate job markets and building highly exploitative employment models. The broader arrangement is often described as neocolonialism: a system in which less-developed countries supply resources and labor toward the further enrichment of developed ones, without those resources being directed toward their own development. In response, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order in 1974, calling for developing nations to hold sovereignty over their natural resources and pursue industrialization on their own terms.

  Current estimates place nearly two-thirds of the world's extreme-poverty population in Sub-Saharan African countries. Some observers speculate that China's growing presence in global markets may signal a shift in economic power for BRICS member nations, though the structural patterns of unequal exchange remain largely intact.

• 5. Urban Slums and Violence

  ›

  Around 33 percent of the urban population in the developing world, approximately 863 million people, lived in slums in 2012, according to UN-Habitat. In Sub-Saharan Africa that year, 62 percent of urban residents lived in slums; South Asia stood at 35 percent, Southeast Asia at 31 percent, and East Asia at 28 percent. UN-Habitat also reported that 78 percent of urban residents in the least-developed countries lived in slum conditions.

  Rapid rural-to-urban migration drives much of this pattern. As populations expand in poorer countries, people move from rural areas to cities faster than housing and infrastructure can accommodate them, producing what researchers call "slum cities" in parts of Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where informal settlements house not a marginal portion but the majority of urban residents.

  Several forms of violence against women are disproportionately concentrated in developing regions. Female genital mutilation affects Somalia at a rate of 98 percent of women, Guinea at 96 percent, Djibouti at 93 percent, Egypt at 91 percent, Eritrea and Mali each at 89 percent, Sierra Leone and Sudan each at 88 percent, Gambia and Burkina Faso each at 76 percent, and Ethiopia at 74 percent. The Istanbul Convention, in Article 38, prohibits the practice, and as of 2016 many African countries had legally banned it. Due to migration and globalization, cases have been documented in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

• 6. Health, Water, and Energy

  ›

  In 2015, the World Health Organization estimated that one in three people, or 2.4 billion, lacked access to sanitation facilities, while 663 million people had no access to safe and clean drinking water. A 2017 estimate put the number without safely managed sanitation at 4.5 billion. About 892 million people, or 12 percent of the global population, practiced open defecation in 2016; 76 percent of them, or 678 million people, lived in just seven countries. India accounted for 348 million of those, followed by Nigeria at 38.1 million, Indonesia at 26.4 million, Ethiopia at 23.1 million, Pakistan at 19.7 million, Niger at 14.6 million, and Sudan at 9.7 million.

  Malnutrition stunted the growth of about 165 million children under five years of age as of 2013, preventing more than 200 million children in developing countries from reaching their developmental potential. Globally, 4.3 million deaths were attributed to indoor air pollution in developing countries in 2012, almost entirely in low- and middle-income countries, with the South East Asian and Western Pacific regions bearing the largest share at 1.69 million and 1.62 million deaths respectively.

  In 2009, about 1.4 billion people lived without electricity, while 2.7 billion relied on wood, charcoal, and dung for home energy. Kenya stands out as the world leader in the number of solar power systems installed per capita, a sign that small-scale renewable energy can serve as a direct route out of energy poverty for rural and remote communities.

• 7. Climate Change and Forced Riders

  ›

  Developed countries produce 79 percent of global carbon emissions, yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has confirmed that developing countries face the greatest risk from the consequences. Countries with small per-capita greenhouse gas emissions but high exposure to climate impacts have been described as "forced riders" as opposed to "free riders"; examples named in the source include Comoros, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu.

  The Climate Vulnerability Monitor estimated in 2012 that climate change causes an average of 400,000 deaths annually, mainly from hunger and communicable disease in developing countries. Economies in the least-developed countries lost an average of 7 percent of their gross domestic product for 2010 due to climate-related reductions in labor productivity. Rising sea levels cost the least-developed countries 1 percent of GDP in 2010, and 4 percent in the Pacific, with 65 billion dollars annually lost from the world economy as a result.

  During the Cancun COP16 in 2010, donor countries committed to providing an annual 100 billion dollars by 2020 through the Green Climate Fund to help developing countries adapt, but concrete pledges have not been fully forthcoming. Bangladesh, often cited as one of the most vulnerable countries, created the world's first national climate adaptation programme in 2009 and has spent on average 1 billion dollars per year in support of it. A World Bank report from 2018 estimated that around 143 million people across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 to escape slow-onset climate effects including falling water availability, declining crop productivity, and rising sea levels.

  French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking at the 2017 COP23 in Bonn, said: "Climate change adds further injustice to an already unfair world" -- a remark that captures the tension between those who caused warming and those who bear the worst of its costs.