Developing country? (Page 9)

at the end of the day, one still needs to put out something quantifiable, a rank, an index, an ordering that people can go by. we cant consider countries underdeveloped or developing simply because someone wants to hold their nose up and say they stink.

even questions such as happiness index that researchers have tried to develop indicators for have been fraught with issues of bias, unintentional or otherwise. it reflects the bias of the researcher who's putting together the survey. it is also hard to verify. people lie about such things on surveys. Which is why people try to use proxy indicators that can get at the same things but using verifiable objective standards.

as for corruption, how's that tied to traditional development status? japanese and italian politicians had been crooked and corrupt for the longest time, but they're not considered developing nations, are they? there has been mass-scale deceit in the US subprime markets, what of that? people lying on documentation to get loans, with a little help from the mortgage brokers. the level of that deception would put many of your corrupt countries to shame.

u're welcome to come up with all kinds of indicators of course. maybe even 100s of them. dont know that it wld convince some of us as to who is developing and who is not. whenever we produce unsorted comprehensive lists, we start producing raw data, realms of it, that become hard to interpret and stop making sense imo.

I think except for gender discrimination, almost all others will fit in the table I mentioned re corruption. There was a report yesterday on all major newspaper websites about how women are facing discrimination everywhere in the world. However, having said that I quote from the HRW website which clearly shows that gender discrimination, and sexual crimes against women  are more rampant in developing countries.

"Millions of women throughout the world live in conditions of abject deprivation of, and attacks against, their fundamental human rights for no other reason than that they are women.

Combatants and their sympathizers in conflicts, such as those in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and Rwanda, have raped women as a weapon of war with near complete impunity. Men in Pakistan, South Africa, Peru, Russia, and Uzbekistan beat women in the home at astounding rates, while these governments alternatively refuse to intervene to protect women and punish their batterers or do so haphazardly and in ways that make women feel culpable for the violence. As a direct result of inequalities found in their countries of origin, women from Ukraine, Moldova, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Burma, and Thailand are bought and sold, trafficked to work in forced prostitution, with insufficient government attention to protect their rights and punish the traffickers. In Guatemala, South Africa, and Mexico, women's ability to enter and remain in the work force is obstructed by private employers who use women's reproductive status to exclude them from work and by discriminatory employment laws or discriminatory enforcement of the law. In the U.S., students discriminate against and attack girls in school who are lesbian, bi-sexual, or transgendered, or do not conform to male standards of female behavior. Women in Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia face government-sponsored discrimination that renders them unequal before the law..."

This is certainly not a comprehensive list as it fails to mention several other culprit nations including India, but at a glance it is obvious who heads the list here, too.

THE ACCOUNT OF THE MEMBER WHO POSTED THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY BANNED.

If you think this is an error please Contact us.

THE ACCOUNT OF THE MEMBER WHO POSTED THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY BANNED.

If you think this is an error please Contact us.

when u have a country that is supposed to be at the top or near-top of the list ranked low down, it does throw the entire methodology into question. in some of the exact same lists that u've come up with, the US ranks low. even japan and italy would rank low unless they are massaging the data. human rights watch even cites the US for various human rights violations. now if that's the kind of lists one considers useful, then i suppose most countries would be better off following the US lead in terms of being ranked low on those lists.

outliers in statistics are very important. it's those high-sigma deviation events that explain the mess people have gotten into with the subprime fiasco. we also use extreme-value theories in all walks of life and most people dont even realize that, starting from when we design for stress tests etc to protect buildings against earthquakes to developing financial pricing/ risk management models. cant dismiss extremes just because they are inconvenient to explain or dont fit our norms.

 G.  your list of unmeasurables up there could be viewed as derivatives of measurables (bolded above)  that Raj and cb are talking about. If marked improvement can be made and seen in the economic indicators, there would be a direct improvement in social aspect that you are talking about, barring religion and gender discrimination to a lesser extent.  There is a lot more social freedom in Europe compared to the USA but they have not been able to take no. 1 spot so I would agree with CB here that measurable indicators carry more weight in overall assessment.   Simply put, better economics have power to uplift an individual or a nation.

If pro is the opposite of con is progress the opposite of congress - Jon Stewart in America: The Book. If what is a country doing if it is not developing, undeveloping?

Well jokes apart there are different ways to determine if a country is a developed or developing country. The two most significant measures would be economic and social measures.

The most important economic factor is economic growth and stability - growing GDP, unemployment rates, per capita income, inflation, cost of living etc. Most countries cannot achieve excellence in all of it, but a reasonable combination of all provides for a steady economy.

After economic stability one has to see the distribution of wealth, business and tax structure. A large disparity between high and low income groups, small and large business, various tax brackets and tax structures is detrimental to progress.

Derivative of the economy is the infrastructure, good roads, efficient public service and utilities system, education and health care systems and other utilities that support the country.

Most important social factors are the very basic core values like human rights, fair and equal treatment of minorities. Next come social freedoms like freedom of speech, expression, civilian rights etc. Derivate of social factors is social environment, social ethics, families, emotional well being, social networking etc. Since society is more diverse than economy bringing about a balance of social factors can be more challenging and open to more subjective measures.

There will always be other factors like technology, environment etc that rise and can either be classified with economy or society or separate. There are some hybrid factors to depending on the nation.

In my opinion based on economic and social factors I feel Scandinavian nations are most developed and progressive. Even though the United States is often cited as a world power Scandinavians are more economically self sufficient and have a more stable and happy social structure. A lot of the Arabic nations and Japan have a high level of economic stability but have weaker society due to human rights issues or social/emotional well being issues. A lot of Asian countries and Eastern European countries are rapidly developing but progress is hampered by corruption, economic disparity and difficulty smoothing social issues. Latin America is also developing and even though behind some Asian nations their development has been steadier. Africa perhaps has the nations that are worst in respect to economy and society. The USA, I really do not know what to say - it is not that economically or socially progressive as it is made out to be.

THE ACCOUNT OF THE MEMBER WHO POSTED THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY BANNED.

If you think this is an error please Contact us.