Talk:Developing country

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Improve section on common characteristics

I've done some work on a new section on common characteristics. I think this is important for laypersons to grasp some of the problems that people in developing countries are dealing with. I looked around in related Wikipedia articles to see if there was a good description anywhere. So far, I have not found much yet. However, I did find this paragaph under Third World and am thinking of perhaps moving and updating it to here (the word "Third World" would be replaced with "developing country"). However, this could also open up a mine field as there might be many controversial issues there. What do you think? This is the paragraph in question:

However, despite decades of receiving aid and experiencing different development models (which have had very little success), many Third World countries' economies are still dependent on developed countries, and are deep in debt. There is now a growing debate about why Third World countries remain impoverished and underdeveloped after all this time. Many argue that current methods of aid are not working and are calling for reducing foreign aid (and therefore dependency) and utilizing different economic theories than the traditional mainstream theories from the West. Historically, development and aid have not accomplished the goals they were meant to, and currently the global gap between the rich and poor is greater than ever, though not everybody agrees with this. EMsmile (talk) 02:54, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

I think I am making good progress on this section on common characteristics (still not finished). I've just added a sub-section on global warming. Will still do more work on that.EMsmile (talk) 13:13, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

I've done more work on this section but it's still not great. In the next few days I am going to rework the sub-section on global warming, based on feedback I received from a colleague. EMsmile (talk) 03:59, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

I've completed my round of edits on the section on global warming, trying to improve logical flow and taking out repetitions. I hope it's better now. My main aim was to introduce the main concepts; I hope it's not overly detailed but just the right amount of detail together with the overview information. EMsmile (talk) 15:53, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Added more information about criticisms about use of the term

I have just updated and added some more information in the section about criticisms about the use of the term. I have also added a bit about this in the lead section. Does someone want to help me improve this further? EMsmile (talk) 01:35, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Discussion about name change (again)

Does anyone want to suggest that we change the name of this article from "developing country" to LMICs? I am not in favour of that as per WP:Commonname but I am interesting to hear a discussion. An outcome could be to rename the article and to redirect "developing country" to LMIC. Personally, I think we should wait with such a step until we see a clear indication that big organizations, like the UN, are phasing out the use of the term. So far I am not seeing that (apart from World Bank). - In addition we could think further about how to improve this article and related sub-articles like Least Developed Countries. EMsmile (talk) 01:33, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

We might consider changing the whole article from being an actively used concept to a concept belonging to the past. The world is now mainly consisting of middle-income countries and thus developing and developed is a description of how the world looked at the end of the colonial era, but not now. Then the new articles would be Low income country, Lower middle income country, Upper middle income country, and High income country. And a number of things from this article could be moved into those. Olle Terenius (UU) (talk) 14:15, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

You are basically suggesting breaking up the existing article into four separate articles, User:Olle Terenius (UU). Or alternatively, renaming this article to "Low income country". I think there would be plenty of overlap and repetition between three of the articles (i.e. low income, lower middle income, upper middle income) so I don't really see much benefit. Here is another suggestion: how about starting with renaming developed country to "high-income country"? At the moment high income country redirects to developed country. Could be something to suggest on the other article's talk page? I still think it's useful to have an article that groups together all the other countries that are not high-income countries (whatever you want to collectively call them), as they have so much in common in terms of structural problems. - I hope more editors will weigh in on this discussion. There has got to be more people who have this article on their watchlist?? EMsmile (talk) 06:34, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Per WP:COMMONNAME and your first comment, it seems we should keep the current title. Crossroads ^-talk- 05:35, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Poland is developing… And developed?

This article says Poland is developing, but "developed" is literally the 4th word in the article summary for Poland when you search "Poland wiki." The article makes it sound like Poland is a rich country, but this one says it is developing. Why? 5.173.130.112 (talk) 22:35, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree, it's very misleading. I think the problem is that we're using the IMF definition of "developing", and for some obscure reason, they deem it necessary to class Poland as "developing" which throws it into the same category as impoverished nations such as Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. Laughable isn't it. Poland has a VERY high human development index with high incomes, high life expectancy, excellent infrastructure, excellent public services, and yet it's classed as a developing country by IMF like Botswana. Poland isn't far off the standards of living of Western Europe, and its economy is currently the 8th largest in the EU and growing. If that makes it developing then I don't know what else to say!

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