Developing countries, and/or the inaccurate, out-of-date terms[1] majority world, Third world and the "South" all refer to the countries that rank the lowest on the Human Development Index.

History

Many developing countries have been colonised. In many cases, this event has had a positive economic influence (as foreign companies and together with it, foreign knowledge and crafsmanship) have then started to enter the country, and some new forms of industry -ie mining- have emerged). However, in some cases it has also left scars as when the colonial powers exited the country, the economy declined as much knowledge/expertise left.

Economic growth

GDP growth for 2013

Throughout history, economic development has varied depending on the developing country in question. For example, most African countries have developed little troughout history, and even in the last hundreds of years have had little progress. Asian countries have seen -in comparison- much more development, although still less than most Western countries. The last decades though, things have been picking up quite heavily for all developing countries. So much even, that most developing countries today have a (much) higher economic growth than developed countries, although they are in total still much behind the Western countries. See the World Economic Outlook 2012 map

The downside of this rapid economic growth however that this sparks more urbanization which negatively effects the environment in these (still relatively pristine) countries. In many cases, rapid urbanization in developing countries has happened by not following any ordered urban pattern at all. Rather, people built their houses -legally or illegally- at any location, and sewerage, roads and electricity lines follow after that. It is clear that this, in addition to the general increasing of the population and housing, severaly reduces efficiency.

Environmental efforts

Many developing countries have allready much to suffer from climate change. For some[2] things will become even far worse and will see their entire country vanish due to climate change. This aswell as other environmental problems such as deforestation raises great concern on the population -especially as due to being more directly dependant on the environment (ie many people still need to manually collect potable water, firewood, ... directly from the environment) they can easily see the devastating impact this will have on their lives/livelihood-.

However, despite the huge threat that climate change faces, many developing countries lack funding and so are less able than developed countries to find appropriate solutions to counter this. In treaties such as the Kyoto protocol, it has been arranged that developing countries hence do not need to reduce their emissions as much as developed countries. Although this indeed makes sense, it should be noted that the Kyoto protocol was only but a stepping stone to reduce emissions and not a final solution. The emission reductions noted herein are nowhere near what is needed to aduquatly reduce emissions. With a more aduquate protocol, emission reductions of even developing countries would be on par to the emission reductions asked from developed countries today, and developed countries would need to attain far higher emission reductions. In practice, this could be easily done and the impression that developing countries could not achieve this is incorrect. This as reducing emissions can be done at various ways, using both high-tech solutions (ie reducing emissions from industry/transport) as low-tech solutions (ie population management, energy-efficient food production, ...) .[3] In addition, with more efficient use of energy, even high-tech solutions (reducing emissions from industry/transport) can be handled by developing countries. TokelauW for example has switched to using only solar energy and renewable energy (coconut) oil.

In addition, tackling climate change may even prove economically beneficial to (certain) developing countries. For example REDD allows countries to attain revenue simply by leaving their forests standing. Also, the flexible mechanisms (JI, CDM) allow to attract foreign investment/development.

Besides tackling climate change, other environmental projects may also be beneficial to the economy. Especially projects that recycles waste/litter from abroad (ie from developed countries), allows the injecting of capital to the country. An example is the Flip Flop Recycling Project.

Notes and references

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See also

External links

  1. Although a convenient shorthand, the "South" is a inaccurate term as it suggests that the developing nations are further South than the developed nations. Consider Australia and Mongolia as two obvious counter-examples. Further, consider Albania, Japan and Malaysia as counter-examples to the idea of countries in the same region belonging to the same economic class.
  2. Ie low-lying islands as Mauritius, Fiji,, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Micronesia, ... and even some low-lying countries as Bangladesh
  3. http://kvdp.blogspot.com
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