Talk:Developing country

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Improve section on public health risks

The section on public health risks could be beefed up and become its own section rather than be under "trends". I haven't worked on this article before so I am just wondering if others have thought about this in the past. EMsmile (talk) 12:24, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

I've done a bit of work on this but it needs more work. See also below. EMsmile (talk) 02:54, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

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)

Overview, revamp, proposal

EMsmile asked me to take a look at this article. I did have a quick peek a few weeks ago and it struck me as a bit of a mess. I don't have access to sources, but I can give a common-sense scrub-up (i.e. flagging up or dealing with inconsistencies or repetitions). I'll see what I can do. I dont' know how many articles there are on overlapping definitions (e.g. Third World), but it strikes me that one article about poor countries ought to be brought to GA if not FA standards. A whole team will be needed; what is the best WikiProject to attempt to enlist? Carbon Caryatid (talk) 20:40, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

I've now done what I can. I had to go back and forth to developed country (which I left untouched). In that both are defined in common language as polar opposites and in terms of each other, might it be an idea to agree on one main article (perhaps even a new one) that would define and describe both, and then not have contradictory claims in the daughter articles? Just thinking aloud. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 11:53, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Great, thanks so much for your work. The article has benefited greatly from it. Just one small thing that I changed back: I do think we need a section heading called "criticism", which perhaps gets expanded a little if people have the relevant references at hand. I often hear people say "I don't like the term 'developing country'" so I think it helps to have that section on criticism. However, when I first started with the article it had all its focus on terminology and criticism but very little on what these types of countries have in common. I think we should not get too hung up about those definitions. If someone wants to call it "Countries of Type X" I would be fine with it too. What I am trying to explain to laypersons is what kinds of challenges these "countries of Type X" have in common. And there are lots. Climate vulnerability (something I just added yesterday), energy poverty, lack of sanitation etc. I think this is more important than just the theories around the term "developing". I'd also like to build up the section on "Opportunities" (to make it sound less doom and gloom) but my expertise is more in the area of the challenges (I come from the sanitation sector side). So I would rely on others to help with the "opportunities" section. - I don't see contradictory claims in the sub-articles - which ones do you mean? And what would an overarching article be called? Perhaps "Country categories", or "List of country groupings"? I could imagine a list type article, a bit like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_pond . Maybe that's helpful although there are so many similar terms (see the first sentence of this article where I have tried to now mention the main ones). So there would be a huge grouping of terms that are all synonymous of developing countries and a huge grouping of terms that are synonyms of developed countries. Is that what you had in mind?EMsmile (talk) 13:01, 5 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)