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The different nations can be divided up into three parts:
- developed or industrialized,
- developing countries
- and less-developed countries.
I want to turn your attention to the less-developed countries, whose living-standard is very small.
Characteristics:
Demographic and social features:
- rapidly increasing population
- insufficient medical care
- high child mortality
- low life expectancy
- insufficient educational facilities
- high illiteracy
- malnourishment and starvation
- low income per head
- big gap between rich and poor
- migration from impoverished rural areas to town slums
Economic features:
- economic structure based on agriculture (a large but neglected
sector)
- mainly primitive subsistence farming
- low productivity
- limited technology, infrastructure and social and political institutions
- economy can't keep pace with the increase of population
- heavy reliance on export earnings from the sale of primary products
- import of mainly manufactured/finished goods
- low labour standards, low wages, child labour
- accelerating environmental pollution
- heavy debts
One of the reasons for these differences between the rich and the poor countries is that the LCDs had mostly formerly been colonies and after independence they have continued to depend on one or two commodities. But these crops are for export, they don't provide food for the local population. Furthermore governments spend less on health and education because financial institutions decided to make further loans conditional on cuts in government spending. There also has been a decline in the prices of the world markets but the prices on products, which LDCs are providing, have collapsed.
Fertility Rate:
source: https://www.rifpd.org/Overview/Predicaments/Population/population.html
(rifpd = Rotarian Fellowship for Population and Development)
This map shows that the fertility rate particularly in the LCDs is very high, like in Mali, Senegal and Ethiopia or Tanzania, for example.
Concerning the population growth I found the following information from a recent United Nations' report:
Population Source
Population in 1950
Population in 2000
Population in 2050
Less developed countries
1.7 billion
4.9 billion
8.2 billion
More developed countries
0.8 billion
1.2 billion
1.1 billion
Reasons for this expected enormous growth in the LCDs are that the LCDs don't have enough experiences in contraception and furthermore mostly the children are the "capital" of the adults. They have to take care of their parents when they are old and they also have to go to work to provide the family with food.
Concluded I want to show you the following bar chart:
Child Mortality Rate for Boys and Girls in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, 1988-98 * (per 1,000)
There is a substantial difference in child mortality rates even within the same income groups. Children living in Sub-Saharan Africa are at the greatest risk of dying before they reach the age of 5. In South Asia, girls have a much greater risk of dying than their brothers do. (source: World Bank Group)
The reasons for the low life expectancy in the LCDs are shown by the next pie chart:
Death to Children under Age 5 by Main Cause, Less Developed Countries, 1995
Source: UNICEF, The State of the World\'s Children, 1998.
Acute respiratory infections: Akute Atemwegserkrankungen
Diarrhea: Durchfall
Perinatal causes: perinatale (=kurz vor, während und nach der Entbindung betreffend) Ursachen
Measles: Masern
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