Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
have high dependency ratios and also very high per cap-
ita GNIs. We can employ countless other statistics to
measure social welfare, including literacy rates, infant
mortality, life expectancy, caloric intake per person,
percentage of family income spent on food, and amount
of savings per capita.
Looking through all of the maps that measure devel-
opment, we gain a sense that many countries come out in
approximately the same position no matter which of these
measures is used. Each map and each statistic shares one
limit with per capita GNI: they do not capture differences
in development
within
countries, a question we consider
at the end of this chapter.
1,000
466
500
182
195
8
0
972
1,000
500
441
341
Development Models
This discussion of ways of measuring development takes
us back to another problem with terminology. The word
developing
suggests that all countries are improving their
place in each of these indicators, increasing literacy,
improving communications, or increasing productiv-
ity per worker. Beyond the problem of terminology, the
very effort to classify countries in terms of levels of devel-
opment has come under increasing attack. The central
concern is that development suggests a single trajectory
through which all countries move. The development
model, then, does not take geographical differences very
seriously. Just because Japan moved from a rural, agrarian
state to an urbanized, industrial one does not mean that
Mali will, or that it will do so in the same way. Another
criticism of the development model is that the conceptu-
alization of development has a Western bias. Critics argue
that some of the measures taken in poorer countries that
the West views as progress, such as attracting industry
and mechanizing agriculture, can lead to worsened social
and environmental conditions for many people in the
poorer countries. Still others criticize the development
model because it does not consider the ability of some
countries to infl uence what happens in other countries,
or the different positions countries occupy in the world
economy. Instead, the development model treats coun-
tries as autonomous units moving through a process of
development at different speeds.
The classic development model, one that is subject
to each of these criticisms, is economist Walt Rostow's
modernization model
. Many theories of development
grew out of the major decolonization movements of the
1960s. Concerned with how the dozens of newly indepen-
dent countries in Africa and Asia would survive economi-
cally, Rostow looked to how the economically powerful
countries had gotten where they were.
Rostow's model assumes that all countries fol-
low a similar path to development or modernization,
advancing through fi ve stages of development. In the
33
0
1,000
740
500
169
150
4
0
The
Netherlands
Mexico
Malawi
World
Average
Country
Figure 10.3
Differences in Communications Connectivity, 2005.
Data
from:
Earthtrends, World Resources Institute.
examined by summing production over the course of a
year and dividing it by the total number of persons in
the labor force. A more productive workforce points to
a higher level of mechanization in production. To mea-
sure access to technology, some analysts use transpor-
tation and communications facilities per person, which
reduces railway, road, airline connections, telephone,
radio, television, and so forth to a per capita index and
refl ects the amount of infrastructure that exists to facili-
tate economic activity. Figure 10.3 highlights some of
the extraordinary disparities in communications access
around the world.
Other analysts focus on social welfare to measure
development. One way to measure social welfare is the
dependency ratio
, a measure of the number of depen-
dents, young and old, that each 100 employed people
must support (Fig. 10.4). A high dependency ratio can
result in signifi cant economic and social strain. Yet, as
we saw in Chapter 2, the aging countries of Europe
