I've already made a video all about what makes a country a country, so if we just stick with
the UN's figure of 193 countries, how should we rank them? By GDP? By average height? By
number of physicians? By cucumber production? Or by percentage of the population using improved
sanitation facilites? With so many different metrics, how will one country ever know if
it's doing better than another. For example, the US probably likes to think it's more developed
than South Africa. However, the latter actaully has a much higher health insurance coverage
rate. Saying that, they probably need it because, like any good soap opera, they have a murder
rate around six times higher. So because people are lazy they tend to slot countries into
broad groups. Probably the most common are, first, second and third world countries. But
what do these terms even mean? If you're relative just died and left you a country, how would
you take it from third to first? And what's really the best way to rank the countries?
Firstly, we should establish what these terms actually mean, and it's a little more complicated
then just rich versus poor. In fact the meanings of these groupings has changed a huge amount
since they were first coined. Originally, Switzerland and Qatar would have both been
members of the third world, but that's pretty incorrect by what we think them to mean today.
Originally used by the UN in the 40s, the terms, just like Hacky Sacks, really broke
out during the Cold War Era. The first world were the capitalist, western aligned countries.
The second world were the communist Russian or Chinese aligned countries. And the third
world were all the countries sensible or uninterested enough to remain neutral.
Since the end of the Cold War, which like all good things featured David Hasselhoff
for some reason, the meanings of these terms have changed quite a lot. The first world
is still home to many of the same countries it was back then but the countries political
stance is no longer a requisite for entry. Instead, these are just the most industrialised,
prosperous and democratically free countries. The second world, which is far less used nowadays,
again just like Hassellhoff, generally refers to countries with a fairly good level of prosperity
but might lack slightly on the freedom side of things. The third world is most commonly
used to describe poorer countries that are lacking, at least in part in all three of
the criteria. Because of how ambiguous these terms still are, people often debate where
certain countries fit into this model. I mean technically Putin is more popular than many
western leaders and even North Korea would argue everyone there is happy and healthy.
Clearly, there are some issues with this system of categorisation and not only because it's
fairly derogatory to most countries that didn't colonise and exploit their way to success.
And in fact many people are trying to move away from the three worlds model because of
this stigma on the third world. Whether you call them 'developing nations', 'pooerer counties'
or 'shit holes' you're likely to offend someone. So for this reason people have devoted their
careers to finding a scientific way of ranking the development level of a country, because
no one can be offended by science. You'll often hear politicians and ecconomists talking
about GDP but that's only a measure of wealth. Countries like Saudi Arabia place pretty highly
on the GDP charts but the Freedom House Organisation gave them a rating of 7/100 of personal and
policial freedom. Recently, the Scandanavian countries have been the talk of Europe because
they often rank so highly on happiness charts. But the most recent list topper, Finland also
has the 8th highest suicide rate in Europe. Which is clearly somewhat contridictary. Therefore,
to get a real measure of a country's development we can't just look at one factor, we have
to look at many. This is where the Human Development Index comes into play.
Back in 1990, Mahbub ul Haq formed a group of development economists at the UN’s Human
Development Report Office. There they looked to create a simple formula to measure a country's
development and “shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting
to people-centered policies.'' While you could argue they’ve succeeded in the second point,
the formula didn’t end up looking all that simple.
To boil it down, it combines three main measurements of country’s development into one score.
It takes the life expectancy, the average time spent in education and the gross national
income per capita and does some smart people calculations to make these into usable numbers.
To get the final Human Development Index they just times these numbers together and cube
root it.
As you can probably imagine, certain countries do very well in this measure. Specifically,
the OECD countries, a group that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development. These nations, like the US, UK and Japan remain some of the most developed
countries according to the index. In 2007 the human development index for the rest of
the world was at the rates the OECD group was at nearly 70 years ago in 1938.
There’s been some debate in recent years about how accurate the HDI really is. The
term ‘fourth world’ was coined to describe countries that are in the first world but
have swathes of the population living in third world conditions. To combat this the IHDI
was introduced which would measure the inequality of the country and factor this into the equation.
If you look at these lists side by side you can see the countries that lose the most from
this new measurement. The US alone drops by 9 places.
So, how could you raise your country’s HDI ranking? Unfortunately, for you and you’re
newly inherited country there’s no straightforward path. There are a lot of things that many
of the highly developed nations have in common, but there are almost always exceptions to
the rule.
Could it be about having democracy and a fair judicial system? Well, China knocks that theory
out of the water. Could increasing the number of people attending university work? Although
this raises the Education Index part of the HDI many countries like Russia and other Eastern
European countries have high levels of education but often lack the national income and life
expectancy to rank highly. Maybe do a China and strictly control your population growth?
But again countries like Russia have been declining in population at the same time their
HDI rank has been declining so it can’t be that. Could it be about industrialisation?
North Korea bucks the trend here with high industrialisation but still manages to be
one of the poorest countries in the world. On top of that states like New Zealand and
Iceland have very little industry and still do very well on the HDI.
There are other suggestions about what causes development. On one of the newest episodes
of David Letterman’s Netflix series Melinda Gates says ‘no country has ever escaped
poverty without free and available contraception. There’s certainly truth to this, life expectancy
includes infant mortality which in several African countries is still at nearly 10%.
However, Oceana, whose population is mostly made up of the highly developed, OECD countries
of Australia and New Zealand has the second lowest use of contraception. Even Nicaragua,
which ranks 124th on the regular HDI has the 5th highest contraceptive use rate of any
country.
There are obviously thousands of things that could be seen to boost the human development
index, far too many to talk about in this video. So to give a real world example, let’s
look at one of the richest, most developed countries out there. One that managed this
development in a fraction of the time it took others. Singapore.
To give you an impression of just how quickly Singapore became the opposite of its name,
in 1970 it’s GNI was under 1000 dollars, in that same year the United States GNI was
$5250. Just forty years later in 2010 the gap between the two was very similar but Singapore
now sat at a GNI of $44,790. That’s above countries like the UK, France, Japan and Canada
all from a country with half the land area of greater London.
So how did they manage to jump from what would arguably be third world into the very top
of the first world. Well, luckily for me, the man often credited with a lot of this
success, the country's first prime minister after independence Lee Kuan Yew, wrote a series
of books and called one of them “From Third World To First”.
Because the book is like 700 pages long I’m going to cut it down to three main points.
Firstly, the country has become the Zurich of Asia. The country is seen as one of the
world’s best places to do business and in a continent that, until pretty recently, didn’t
have many destinations that you’re average faceless multinational corporation would feel
safe doing business in. In his book Yew tells of the time when Singapore was just beginning
to have thoughts of development. Back then, the stock exchanges and the financial markets
would open in Zurich, then Frankfurt, followed in order by London, New York and San Francisco.
The Zurich banks would open at 9am and the San Francisco banks would close in the afternoon.
However, this meant that there was a 7 to 8 hour gap in between. Singapore was perfectly
positioned to bridge this gap and make a 24/7 global trade network.
The second reason Singapore has been so successful is it’s harsh crack downs on corruption.
Compared to most of its neighbours it’s does very well on this front. Yew attributes
this not only to the tough sentences and laws imposed in the country but also says that
the corruption and bribery in other Asian nations is almost ingrained in their society,
it’s a way of life. Get a parking ticket, pay a bribe. Need to get goods into the country
without anyone knowing pay a bribe. Need to get a government contract just pay a bribe.
Reportedly, Singapore has managed to widley remove this sentiment from it’s people,
which is particularly impressive considering just a generation ago they were pretty much
all immigrants from countries where bribery was rife. In the late 1990s Singapore ranked
as the least corrupt nation in Asia and the 8th least corrupt in the world.
However, probably the biggest contributor to the country's success is its location.
Not only was it positioned well as a financial hub but also as a trade hub. It sits at the
mouth of the Malacca strait and as we know from historic cases like Panama and Gibraltar
as well as not so historic ones like Crimea, access to the world’s oceans and being able
to cut trade route length by days or weeks is an incredibly powerful card to hold. Another
incredibly powerful resource is oil, in 2011 of the 87 million barrels produced every day,
15.2 million made their voyage through this one waterway. That’s second only to the
Strait of Hormuz which for obvious reasons has a little more oil traffic.
Singapore’s development has come at a cost though. The media is highly state controlled
and dissent is quashed when it arises. Political protests are almost never seen in the country
and for a highly developed nation they lack some of the liberal poverty of it’s first
world friends, like the fact that homosexual acts are still 100% illegal.
So cleary, of all the things that can make a country develop, some can be engineered
and some are just about luck and fortune. Singapore has one thing that I think shows
it’s a truly developed, well mannered nation. Remember when we were talking about improved
sanitation facility use earlier. Well in Singapore you don’t have a choice. Many elevators
in the country have sensors to detect if someone is urinating in them and you’ll be fined
$150 if you don’t flush the toilet.
Let me hear about your theories about what makes a country develop in the comments and
maybe tell me what you think should be a Singapore-eske law in your country. Thanks for watching the
video. Please like and subscribe if you’d like to see more.