A Study of Economic Development across the world

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A study of Economic Development across the World 

 

Economic development is the increase in the well being of a country or region’s inhabitants including an improvement in the standards of living and quality of life through the increase and development of economic wealth. Economic development is measured by the HDI or Human development index which gives a country a rank depending upon 3 main areas of development; health, education and GDP per capita. The HPI or human poverty index is also used as this is thought to better reflect the extent of deprivation than the HDI. The HPI measures life expectancy (in particular the number of people expected to die before the age of 40), knowledge and standards of living. The worse a country scores on these indicators the higher it is ranked. The development of a country can also be measured by the Millennium Development Goals. These are 8 goals that were set by the United Nations in 2000 to be achieved globally by 2015 and aim to improve all areas of human and economic development.

 

Firstly Latin America and the Caribbean, this region has shown good economic development in recent years but this has only been in some areas; mainly education and some health aspects. They have achieved the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education and have attained better gender equality in education with more girls enrolling in Secondary education. With health they have also achieved a great deal. In the last 15 years mortality rates of children under 5 have more than halved and are now at 26 per 1000 live births compare this to the 171 per 1000 live births in Sub-Saharan Africa and it is quite an achievement. There have also been steps taken to improve reproductive health; nearly 70% of married women now use contraception, 95% of pregnant women receive prenatal care, 88% of births are assisted by skilled health staff and maternal mortality rates are 3 times lower than the global average. However while there have been many improvements to the quality of life in this region there are still major problems with inequality of income distribution. The richest 20% of people in this region receive 57% of the total income while the poorest 20% receive less than 3%. On the other hand the inequality across different countries in the region in very small the only big inequalities are within individual countries. The inequality is not only in terms of income but also in healthcare; infant mortality rates are much higher amongst the poor than the rich. Latin America and the Caribbean have also shown improvements in export efficiency reducing the average time for goods to be exported from the region to 23 days compared with 33 days in South Asia and 36 days in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Secondly Sub-Saharan Africa, social indicators of economic development have remained unchanged as an entire region for some time and it is likely that most countries will not achieve the Millennium Development Goals; but looking more closely at individual countries there have been some vast improvements. 29 countries have improved their life expectancy even though it has remained unchanged since 1990 for the whole region. Rwanda made the biggest improvement from 32 to 46 years. Also while the regional incidence of tuberculosis rose between 1990 and 2006 some areas have recorded a decline in incidence rates. Most notable is Somalia ...

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