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Measuring development is about comparing one country to another.

This is achieved by using various human and economic indicators, development data, comparisons and statistics.

The North South divide

MEDCs or More Economically Developed Countries are countries which have a high standard of living and a large GDP.

LEDCs or Less Economically Developed Countries are countries with a low standard of living and a much lower GDP.

The map shows the locations of LEDCs and MEDCs. Most of the southern hemisphere is less developed, while countries in the northern hemisphere are more developed.

Development measures how economically, socially, culturally or technologically advanced a country is.

Studying development is about measuring how developed one country is compared to other countries in the present, or to the same country in the past.

There is no single way to calculate the level of development because of the variety of economies,cultures and peoples.

There are two important ways of measuring development - social and economic.

Social indicators measure the access a population has to education, nutrition, health, leisure and safety - as well as political and cultural freedom.

Material elements, such as wealth and nutrition, are described as the standard of living.

Health and leisure are often referred to as quality of life.

• Health: Do the population have access to medical care? What level of healthcare is available? Is it free? One of the most popular social indicators is life expectancy. This is the average lifespan for someone born in a particular country. Life expectancy can be impacted by a range of situations such as war, disease and natural disasters. If the life expectancy for an area is high – this indicates an MEDC and if the life expectancy is low this is more likely to be an LEDC .
• Education: Do the population have access to education? Is it free? What level of education is available i.e. primary, secondary or further/higher education? Another popular social indicator is adult literacy rate. This is a measure of the percentage of the adult population who are able to both read and write. MEDCs such as the UK will have a very high rate (99%), whereas countries such as Chad will have a lower rate - Chad is currently 27%.

Economic indicators are a measure of a country's wealth and how it is generated. They give a very accessible measure of the amount of wealth in the economy of one country compared with another.

• GNIpc/Gross National Income per capita: This is the main measure of wealth that is used to compare different countries around the world. It measures the total amount of all of the goods and services produced by that country’s population, whether at home or abroad, each year, divided by the number of people who live there. The final figure is always given in US dollars so that an easy comparison can be made between different countries. The higher the GNIpc is, the more developed a country will be.
• Industry: What type of industry dominates? LEDCs focus on primary industries, such as farming, fishing and mining. MEDCs focus on secondary industries, such as manufacturing. The most advanced countries tend to focus more ontertiary or service industries, such as banking and information technology.
• Vehicles per 1,000 people: A final measure looks at the number of cars that people own. This can help to demonstrate the amount of money that is spread through a country. For example, in 2016, the USA had 867 cars per 1,000 people while Somalia had just 5 for every 1,000 people.

Economic measures of development

Measures such as the Gross National Income (per capita) allow an easy comparison to be made between countries.

Positives of using the GNIpc

• It’s easy to use dollars to compare the differences in wealth between countries.
• It gives a baseline figure of the amount per head of population that each person in the country is likely to earn on average each year.

Negatives of using the GNIpc

• Actually working out how much money is earned by people within a country or from earning outside the country is very difficult. It takes a lot of effort to collect this information. In many countries there are concerns about how accurate the information is.
• In our globalised world it is increasingly difficult to work out who owns what and where the money and profit might actually belong.

Social measures of development

Both life expectancy and the infant mortality rate can be used to help to measure the levels of healthcare within a population. These can help to show how developed the medical facilities are.

Positives of using social measures

• Life expectancy and infant mortality rates are very easy rates to record and work out. They do depend on very good information from hospital records, which are kept in most countries.
• Both give a measure that allows a direct comparison with other countries and it is easy to see the pattern and how this will impact healthcare.

Negatives of using social measures

• Not all countries collect good statistics. In many poor countries, there is no money to collect this sort of information.
• Many aid organisations have been at work in LEDCs over many years to help decrease death rates. It is these programmes and NOT additional government funding that have had an impact on life expectancy and infant mortality. For example, Non-Governmental Organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have provided large sums of money to supporting healthcare in LEDCs.

Economic indicators can provide information about the standard of living in a country, while social indicators tell us about the quality of life. The United Nations in 1990 decided that it was time to find a measure which could tell us about both.

For example, some countries e.g. Saudi Arabia, have a higher level of wealth than most LEDCs, so it appears they have a good standard of living. However, social development in the country is low, particularly for women, whose quality of life could be greatly improved.

The HDI was introduced to combine three measures – life expectancy (a social measure), education (average number of years of schooling and expected years of schooling– a social measure) and gross national income per capita (an economic measure).

The calculation of HDI is quite complicated, but in simple terms it is the average of each of the three indicators. A country with a very high HDI will score closer to +1 and a country with a low score will be closer to 0.

These figures below are from the UN Human Development Report (2021).

Advantages of using the HDI

HDI uses 2 types of social data (health and education) and 1 type of economic data which means that the measure uses a broad range of information and is not tied up with only one measure. This is a much more accurate measure of both the standard of living AND quality of life in a country.The information is updated annually and collected by a range of people who ensure that the data is as accurate as possible.

Disadvantages of using the HDI

Some geographers are concerned that wealth (GNIpc/GDPpc) still has too much importance within the HDI weighting and that this still means that rich countries can be artificially high in the rankings.Some raise concerns that the HDI is still too simple and that for a real measure there should be a range of 10 – 15 different measures lumped together into one big composite measure of development.

The factors influencing a country’s development can be historical, environmental, industrial or linked to issues of debt.

Colonialism hindered a LEDCs level of development.

A colony was exploited to supply food and minerals to countries like Britain and France.

There was investment in colonies, but this was focused on things that would help trade between the countries.

In many cases gold, diamonds and other valuable resources were taken back to the home countries leaving the colony with little material wealth.

Land was often taken away from the locals and given as gifts to people involved in the colonisation.

Local industries were forced to close if they were competition for goods made in the colonial powers. For example, under colonialism cotton was grown in India and shipped to the cotton mills of the UK to be made into cloth. This cloth was sold back to the people of India whose own cotton industry was undermined.

People often live subsistence lifestyles in LEDCs where they only produce enough food to eat. Any slight imbalance such as flood, drought or hurricane can tip these people over the edge.

Natural Hazards

Many poor countries have no defences for floods, storms or earthquakes. When a natural hazard hits, people will struggle even more than usual.

Climate extremes

Many LEDCs experience climatic extremes in deserts or tropical rainforest areas. It is difficult to grow food in these environments.

Many people will suffer from malnutrition and starvation. Scientists are increasingly concerned that climate change will impact people who live in LEDCs more than MEDCs.

The governments of these countries will have to keep spending the money set aside for development, to repair or replace what has been lost due to natural disasters, or to provide emergency food or medical aid during famines or epidemics. This means there is rarely any money left over to develop the country.

Natural resources

Often LEDCs depend on extracting raw materials to sell to MEDCs for profit. In many cases, the countries have lost their ownership rights over these raw materials. Therefore large multinational companies will profit from the resources rather than local people…

Resources will often be exported in a raw state so that people in the MEDCs will have the better paid jobs processing the materials and turning them into a more useful product.

Countries that have a high percentage of people working in the primary sector will be less developed than those who have more people in the tertiary and quaternarysector.

This is because LEDCs receive a very small amount of the cost of the goods when sold in LEDCs. For example, a coffee producer from Rwanda, will only receive 3 pence for every £1 of coffee sold.

Nepal has 74% of its population engaged in the primary sector whilst the USA has only 1%.

Some rich countries have gone out of their way to ensure that poor countries do not develop secondary and tertiary industries that might rival their success and income.

Many LEDCs also rely on only one or two primary products as a source of income. If there is less demand for this product, then these countries will struggle to find the money for development, because not enough of their products will be sold.

Countries such as Ghana are dependent on cocoa bean production to make money for the government (30% of GDP). Meanwhile the Maldives depends on tourism for its income (75.1% of its GDP) which means the global pandemic was devastating for their economic and social development.

Many LEDCs are in debt to MEDCs. Some of their income has to pay off these debts.

As poor countries develop, they are often keen to borrow money to help them to develop further. Infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, roads and railway lines all cost money to build.

Countries may run up huge debts with banks and MEDCs and struggle to pay back the debt owed. This is because the loan comes with huge interest repayments. The country can end up owing many times more than the amount it borrowed.

These payments will often mean that there is less money available to the government to help improve the lives of their citizens.