developing countries
Definition:
A description of the poorer nations which came into current usage in the 1960s and began to replace more perjorative terms like 'underdeveloped countries'. less developed countries', 'The Third World'. 'Developing countries' as a term is often now replaced by 'industrializing countries'. Each term tends to have certain connotations, some being more complimentary than others: 'underdeveloped' suggests countries capable of economic development, but which have failed to fulfil some unstated potential. 'Developing' sounds better but was an optimistic gloss, as inreality a country may not be developing. 'Less developed' is perhaps less objectionable than 'Third World' or 'underdeveloped', but implies that such countries should model themselves on those which are more developed. This may prove a very dangerous guide to strategy. 'Industrializing', like 'developing'. was an optimistic gloss. Another term which avoids the above controversy but does little to clarify the issue is to talk about the 'South'. The Brandt Report (1980) made the distinction between the 'North' (or technically-advanced nations) and the 'South' (all other countries incorporating a range from half-industrialized countries like Brazil to extremely poor countries like Chad). 'Developing', or whatever term one chooses to use, means basically poverty. However this is extremely difficult to define and measure absolutely. There are hundreds of millions of people who are illiterate and inadequately sheltered, clothed and nourished. Relatively, poverty can be measured by countries' per capita income. Thus an attempt to quantify 'developing' has been made. A country is considered to be developing if income per head falls below a more or less arbitrarily stated level, usually one-fifth of the per capita income in the United States. However, to say that any country with a per capita income below one-fifth of the US is 'developing' and all other countries are 'developed' is not satisfactory. Using such a criterion, some countries like the oil-producing Middle East states would become advanced. But when one considers other factors like income distribution, level of available services etc., this is clearly not the case. Consequently, other non-monetary indicators such as number of telephones, energy consumption, number of vehicles, life expectancy, illiteracy and unemployment levels have been used. No single indicator has proved to be satisfactory or universally acceptable. The World Bank subdivides developing countries into low income economies, middle income economies (subdivided into oil exporters and oil importers) and least developed countries. Closely related to the problem is the controversy surrounding what is economic development. The meaning of this has ranged from 'economic growth' to 'modernization' to 'distributive justice' to 'socio-economic transformation'. In the early post-World War II years, development meant a rapid and sustained rise in real income per head, together with shifts in economic, technical and demographic characteristics. Since the total volume of output rather than the individual was all important, a country could become 'developed' almost overnight if it could generate foreign exchange rapidly. Then development or 'modernization' emerged, stressing social, psychological, political and educational changes. From the late 1960s economic development has been envisaged more as 'distributive justice' since it was realized that the benefits of growth were not reaching the poorest sections of the community. Today, economic development is regarded as a socio-economic transformation. Economic growth and industrialization are essential but if no attention is paid to the quality of growth, and to social changes, one cannot speak of economic development. Consequently, per capita income is increasingly considered inadequate as a measure of development but must be taken together with other social indicators such as life expectancy, percentage employed in agriculture, consumption of proteins, levels of education etc. Developing countries tend to be characterized by a high percentage of the population employed in agriculture, rapid population growth with high birth rates and high but falling death rates, low levels of sayings per head, low net investment, low public health and poor sanitation, poor technology, high illiteracy and heavy dependence on exports in a small number of often primary products as well as low per capita incomes. The result is that their peoples have a much lower standard of living than that enjoyed in the more economically advanced nations.
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© Westburn Publishers Ltd 2002, The Westburn Dictionary of Marketing edited by Michael J Baker, ISBN 978-0-946433-01-8. www.themarketingdictionary.com. Entry: [Joanna Kinsey and Michael J. Baker], [1998].