Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
employed have closely reflected the various concepts of development
which have been advanced and used over the years. From the 1960s the
measures of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Product
(GNP) per capita have been used to assess broad levels of economic
or material development. By the 1980s, as other conceptualizations of
development were increasingly being advanced, the Human Development
Index (HDI) was introduced by the United Nations and this incorpo-
rated the three aspects of longevity, knowledge and standard of living.
Finally in this chapter, the move toward multidimensional measures of
development - including aspects of gender, social welfare and human
rights - is considered.
The fact that the world is such a manifestly unequal place is the focus
of Chapter 1.3. That the world is becoming less and not more equal is a
vital point to appreciate, especially as there are strong arguments that
wide inequalities in society can be linked with the occurrence of various
forms of social malaise and to social conflict. The chapter then considers
the global spatial expression of such wide inequalities, charting, for
example, the origins of the Third World in the geopolitics of the post-
colonial era. Although it is recognized that critiques of the concept of
the Third World appeared from the early 1970s, giving rise to dichoto-
mies such as developed and developing nations, the global North and
the global South, and rich and poor countries, there is a valid argument
that a disadvantaged, marginalized and poor 'Third World' exists wha-
tever we chose to call it.
This consideration of global inequality leads directly to an examina-
tion of the concept of poverty in Chapter 1.4 and this is particularly
important as many analysts argue strongly that poverty reduction
must be seen as the principal focus of development practice in the con-
temporary world. The chapter reviews the various broad definitions
and associated measures of povery that have been advanced and
employed. At the simplest level poverty can be defined as a lack of
income and thus the lack of goods and services that can be obtained in
the marketplace. But just like development itself, there is a mounting
argument that poverty is best conceptualized and measured as a mul-
tidimensional phenomenon, covering non-economic factors such as
health, education, housing, quality of life, environmental quality and
basic freedoms, among others. The Human Poverty Index developed out
of the Human Development Index by the UN in the 1990s represents
an effective multidimensional measure of poverty, although in 2010 it
was superceded by the Multidimensional Poverty Index.
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