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“The obligation on wealthier countries and individuals to support development in other countries remains until living standards are much more broadly equalized across the world.”
travesty of any notion of solidarity and justice. South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, entered the annals of history as a “middle income” country, a status the country’s new Minister of Finance described at an Overseas Development Institute (ODI) conference as “a joke”. We need radically to reform our notion of what an acceptable standard of living is in 2013. A similar problem appears to be just around the corner as the language of “eradicating poverty” takes hold. By using this shorthand – what people mean, of course, is eradicating extreme income poverty – we may be planting a false understanding in people’s minds. Just as it has become worryingly common to hear countries in which poverty remains a grave problem referred to as countries that have “emerged from poverty”, so families now earning a pittance may start to be considered “non-poor” unless we are strict with our terminology. In my view, the obligation on wealthier countries and individuals to support development in other countries remains until living standards are much more broadly equalized across the world. If we just raised it a little, and redefined lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) as LICs (i.e. raising the bar from an average income of US$3 a day to US$11 a day) a further 48 countries would be low income again.
From low-tech to high-tech
When that much higher standard is factored into the “need” side of the equation, it is clear that many MICs, and certainly all LMICs, still require a great deal of international solidarity and attention. But that is only the start of it. Poverty reduction is only one element of a broader development plan, if a central one. The major development objective for almost all “developing” countries, and of course that includes the so-called MICs, is the move from low-tech to higher-tech production. Among the many alternative ways to categorize countries, to complement or replace the LIC-MIC-HIC measure, there are attempts to assess dependence on natural resources relative to success in developing value added products for the internal market and export. But, in this era, the perennial challenge to move from resource (and tourism) dependence to better paid jobs is facing new constraints, not least from the remarkable development story of one country, China. Not only does China now dominate global low-tech manufacture, increasing its global share from 20% to almost 30% in the last five years, it also dominates the non-OECD share of high-tech manufacture. Since 2007, it has seen its share of high-tech global imports rise from just over 5% to 25% (statistics provided by Eva Paus, Mount Holyoke College, 2013). At the same time as celebrating these remarkable achievements and the impact they have had on poverty reduction in the last two decades or so, this is clearly a game-changing magnitude for other countries seeking to engage in, let alone emerge from, low-tech production. Add to this conundrum the fact that industrialization in the current era has to occur in a sustainable way, or as near ➤
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