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…
Research Design Matters