The term ‘developing country’ has officially been axed by the World Bank – and it’s unclear what it even meant in the first place.
In its 2016 edition of World Development Indicators, the organisation said it would no longer distinguish between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries.
It could mark an important change in how the world views poverty and progression.
Why make this change?
The World Bank said the term was becoming a less relevant way of classifying countries.
It’s partly due to the success of development efforts in the last several decades.
And now the organisation is focusing on ‘sustainable development goals’ for the whole world, and as a result will stop singling out the ‘developing world’.
Why does it matter?
This change marks an ‘evolution’ in thinking about how poverty and prosperity are spread around the globe, the World Bank said.
In published data, there will no longer be a distinction between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries – instead, they will be grouped regionally, for instance ‘East Asia’.
That represents a change to the world’s psyche about how low and middle-income nations should be considered.
Why wasn’t the term scrapped sooner?
Or, rather, why was it introduced in the first place?
Researchers have admitted that there was never a universal agreement of what the terms meant when they were brought in.
The International Monetary Fund says its distinction between advanced and emerging market economies ‘is not based on strict criteria, economic or otherwise’.
The United Nations doesn’t have an official definition of a developing country either – despite attaching the label to 159 nations.
Sorting countries into inflation-adjusted brackets of low, middle and high-income also shows why the term is flawed.
China, Bolivia, and Eritrea, which fall in three different income groups, are all classed as ‘developing’.
Umar Serajuddin, a senior economist in the World Bank’s statistics office, said: ‘The main issue is that there is just so much heterogeneity between Malawi and Malaysia for both to be classified in the same group—Malaysia is more like the US than Malawi.
‘When we lump disparate countries together in the same group, it isn’t really useful.’
Share this with