Underdeveloped countries

Content

• Economic characteristics
• Social characteristics
• The "Pathways of Development"
• Origin of underdevelopment

The underdevelopment It is a concept specially coined to take into account the great differences that exist between countries according to their level of development in the productive forces, but related to the ability to access certain services by the vast majority of the country's inhabitants .

The bulk of underdeveloped countries are sometimes called 'on process of development'.

Economic characteristics

The economic activity of underdeveloped countriesUsually, it is restricted to the production of primary goods, that is, related to agriculture.

Ultimately, there are some industries motivated by specific public policies, or cities in which the service sector is strong but undoubtedly the central thing is the production of raw materials: necessarily, the world market will demand this type of products from an underdeveloped country.

Labor productivity is lower, even in the primary sector, compared to advanced countries.

Social characteristics

In the underdeveloped countries per capita income is always lower, and there are also strong levels of deterioration in social indicators such as nutrition, life expectancy and infant mortality.

The educational level is rather low, and compared to developed countries the proportion of illiterates is much higher.

Access to healthcare is also much lower, and the conditions for transportation within the country tend to be much more precarious than in advanced countries: as can be seen, most of the characteristics only tend to accentuate the differences.

The "Pathways of Development"

The denomination 'on process of development’It responds to a consideration of a univocal path of the countries in the same direction that in a certain way can be thought (little by little the countries were becoming independent, acquiring democracy and guaranteeing civil rights).

However, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which developing countries catch up with development and catch up with those that are currently developed.

Origin of underdevelopment

The dependency theory It was developed in the second half of the 20th century and expresses that the differences are rather between a center and a periphery, where the former has the cutting edge technology to produce products with high added value, only demanding the raw materials produced in the countries underdeveloped (periphery) that add much less value.

If any underdeveloped country wants to move to the developed group, it must generate an economic transformation that is not possible, and it will only end up accumulating debts and going through long periods of crisis.

Thus, it is not a path to development that some countries have already crossed and others have not yet, but rather a world economic structure that made possible the very positive changes that capitalism generated in the world, but also that it has the debts of the terrible living conditions in some underdeveloped countries.

Then a list of underdeveloped countries, focused on those countries with the worst level of human development: