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Tag: hdi

The political geography of human development

The research I did for the previous post on the inadequacy of the widely-used term ‘Global South’ led me to some surprising results about the political geography of development. Although the relationship between latitude and human development is not linear, distance from the equator turned out to have a rather strong, although far from deterministic and not necessarily causal, link with a country’s development level, as measured by its Human Development Index (HDI). Even more remarkably, once we include indicators (dummy variables) for islands and landlocked countries, and interactions between these and distance from the equator, we can account for more than 55% of the variance in HDI (2017). In other words, with three simple geographic variables and their interactions we can ‘explain’ more than half of the variation in the level of development of all countries in the world today. Wow! The plot below (pdf) shows these relationships.     In case you are wondering whether this results is driven by many small counties with tiny populations, it is not, When we run a weighted linear regression with population size as the weight, the adjusted R-squared of the model remains still (just above) 0.50. On a sidenote, including dummies for (former) communist countries and current European Union (EU) member states pushed the R-squared above 0.60. Communist regime or legacy is associated with significantly lower HDI, net of the geographic variables, and EU membership is associated with significantly higher HDI. The next question to consider is whether the relationship between…

The ‘Global South’ is a terrible term. Don’t use it!

The Rise of the ‘Global South’ The ‘Global South‘ and ‘Global North‘ are increasingly popular terms used to categorize the countries of the world. According to Wikipedia, the term ‘Global South’ originated in postcolonial studies, and was first used in 1969. The Google N-gram chart below shows the rise of the ‘Global South’ term from 1980 till 2008, but the rise is even more impressive afterwards. Nowadays, the Global South is used as a shortcut to anything from poor and less-developed to oppressed and powerless. Despite this vagueness, the term is prominent in serious academic publications, and it even features in the names of otherwise reputable institutions. But, its popularity notwithstanding, the ‘Global South’ is a terrible term. Here is why.   There is no Global South The Global South/Global North terms are inaccurate and misleading. First, they are descriptively inaccurate, even when they refer to general notions such as (economic) development. Second, they are homogenizing, obscuring important differences between countries supposedly part of the Global South and North groups. In this respect, these terms are no better than alternatives that they are trying to replace, such as ‘the West‘ or the ‘Third World‘. Third, the Global South/Global North terms imply a geographic determinism that is wrong and demotivational. Poor countries are not doomed to be poor, because they happen to be in the South, and their geographic position is not a verdict on their developmental prospects.   The Global South/Global North terms are inaccurate and misleading Let me show you just how…