Is China a developed country? A long and better answer
inkstonenews.com
inkstonenews.com
> However, other members can challenge the decision of a member to make use of provisions available to developing countries.
https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/devel_e/d1who_e.htm
No country has ever done that, though, not even the US.
> Therefore, In WDI 2016, there is no longer a distinction between developing countries (defined in previous editions as low- and middle-income countries) and developed countries (previously high-income countries). Regional groupings (such as “East Asia”) are now based on geographical coverage rather than a sub-set of countries that were previously referred to as developing. In some occasional cases, where data availability or context have dictated it, we’ve excluded high income from some charts or tables, and we’ve indicated that in the footnotes.
That's when it defined China as "upper middle income." That's based on Gross National Income per capita, as the World Bank calculated it. The thresholds are updated every year and adjusted for inflation.
By the World Bank's definition, China was:
low-income from 87-98 (except 97, when it was lower-middle)
lower-middle from 99-09
upper-middle thereafter
There are 56 upper-middle-income countries right now, out of 218 countries. Brazil, Kazakhstan, Libya, Malaysia, Cuba, Mexico are all upper-middle-income countries by the World Bank's latest definition.
A simple answer may be aggregates matter when it comes to country-to-country comparisons. A country's companies and government get 'strength' from the aggregate first.
I simply mean if you are comparing countries, you need to look at aggregate figures, such as total GDP or market size or population. If one country has lower GDP than another, you could say it is "poor" on that basis, even if per capita GDP (a dis-aggregated figure) were higher.
Taking your example, simply by population size and aggregate GDP and therefore ability to spend on military, India and China ARE stronger than Singapore.
China is confident that it can avoid the trap, though. Lou Jiwei, the former finance minister, famously said 2 years ago that China had a 50/50 chance of getting stuck at "middle income." But now as a head of a different government agency he recently said that he's confident that China will become a high-income country in a few years.
That's probably something we should address in another article later.
The four-tier framework seems to address e.g. Bill Gates' comments about grouping China and the DRC, but it would still leave China in a tier below Western nations even though its ability to compete in global markets probably matches or surpasses many of them.
Edit: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PDbj62...
One thing I’ve found difficult is comparing the US to e.g. European countries. Houses are much bigger in the US but that is in large part due to much cheaper land and often entirely different build quality. Yet a bigger house and yard naturally translates to a higher quality of life. Yet it is not an entirely fair indicator of economic strength.
Sometimes it could be downright deceptive. There was some right wing economists who deemed Mississippi more wealthty/developed than Sweden by looking as such metrics as house size, car ownerships, microwaves and TVs. Yet it did not caputure well that a lot of these people lived in houses bigger than in Sweden but in terrible condition, poor interior and could not afford important basic stuff like health care.
A part of the calculation for this process is build around the size of your bourse, which made good sense 15-20 years ago before urbanization really took off, but makes very little sense today.
It used to be that a country manor was much more expensive than a small downtown apartment. In fact most urban areas with small apartments used to house the lower working class, while country manors used to belong to the upper class.
Today that has switched around. Poor people can literally not afford to live in our largest cities while the most rural manors are now so inexpensive that my three room apartment in our second largest city could by me two-three country manors in the cheapest parts.
We’re changing the way we calculate “citizen net worth”, but in a democracy such a thing takes a long time, so it’ll probably be a few years, and we’ve already been at it for four. And that’s in a country of 5.6 million people, just imagine how slow it’d be in the WTO.
Only holding all else equal, which is impossible. Higher density neighbourhoods provide many benefits in transport, health, culture. Which is why demand far outstrips supply for accommodation in those neighbourhoods in the US.
I used to live in the centre of a city in a flat and I could walk to work, my wife could walk to work and our son could walk to school.
We now live in a house with a nice garden in a rural area where we pretty much have to drive or use the train most days.
I'm not sure you can simply map properties from size to "quality of life" - I'd say my quality of life is about the same - just different.
_Does_ it? I live in a 65sqm terraced house within walking distance of Dublin City Centre. For the same money I could probably get a 2-300sqm house in the middle of nowhere, but I'd have a far lower quality of life (at least subjectively; people who value space more than commute times might disagree, I suppose...)
Smaller houses in European countries vs the US is to some extent a function of differences in urban design. Though it's not like small expensive urban housing doesn't exist in the US; I'm sure many people who live in small apartments in New York think their quality of life is just fine.
There's few trickle down effects because the ruling family spends it all on stuff like shopping trips to Paris.
Negative sideeffect of your precious profession also shows with climate change disbelieve etc.
Even with its vast resource extraction industry which contributes to GDP, their worker productivity is on par with Greece!
Maybe Russia is as well these days, and my perception of it as a bit of an industrial/economic shit-hole is due to now-outdated western propaganda.
The US is #1 in military spending. The US is also #1 in healthcare spending by a large margin, but the additional spending does not translate into better health benefits. Comparing countries through spending can be very misleading.
India's space agency (ISRO) sent a mission to Mars for $73 million USDs (substantially cheaper than an equivalent NASA mission) while a large portion of their population live in precarious conditions.
The "developed country" denomination is useful to get an idea of a country's living standard, but can be misleading in other contexts.
I'm more relating it to my situation where my most of my grandparents passed away early due to famine and disease before my parents became adults and might have never owned a car whereas my parents have much more modern luxuries.
Going by the same logic, can we say that India is more developed than Singapore? And all the small anecdotes showing developed status such as that GIF of Shanghai growing or skyscrapers in Chinese cities are misleading and pointless. You could take similarly modern photos in cities of developing countries all over the world. That doesn't make any of them any more developed.
And statements like these are patently absurd: "But few of them other than China have produced companies with enough money and ambition to put one of their products in the hands of Iron Man and have ads splashed all over soccer stadiums at the World Cup". Most developing countries are home to large corporations as well. Burger King is Brazilian and I'm sure it has placed ads in many prominent events. Does this mean that Brazil is suddenly no longer a developing nation?
And the last part about how a country cannot be classified into developing or developed status because of inequality makes absolutely no sense at all. Sure Shanghai is developed compared to Yunnan. But that's not the point. The point is that as a whole, China is still very poor. As long as a large part of the country is poor and in need of modern infrastructure, it is developing. As compared to countries like Japan where almost EVERY part of it is developed. That's the whole point.
The US created the rules of WTO. Now it wants to change the rules when it thinks it is not winning by resorting to semantic games like these.
Actually I'm wondering if trade happening at the country level. You can easily build a developed country by definition size of Japan by combining several coastal provinces. And that's mostly where"made in China" comes from.
But in the context of the WTO, Trump has framed the question of whether China is a developed country as a matter of fairness. Developing nations get perks – they're allowed leeway in phasing out their trade policies that protect certain sectors.
A central question here is that China is more powerful than any single per capita metric is able to reflect, and therefore may not deserve the kind of flexibility that WTO affords to unquestionably weak and "developing" countries who struggle to transform into a market economy. China sees itself a developing country, but it's arguable whether it needs the kind of flexibility the WTO gives other developing countries.
The logical next question in this context is, are the labels "developing" and "developed" good enough to determine which countries should get preferential treatment in international trade?
That the labels are no longer adequate in many applications is further highlighted by the fact that China is so diverse and vast that there are parts of it that are basically developed countries in their own right, judging by their per capita income levels. On the other hands, there are many provinces that are indisputably low-income by all accepted standards.
The point that China is by and large poor by Western standards is addressed in the first part of the article, and stressed again later. But again, does having a large population of people who live in abject poverty warrant a country differential treatment by an international trade body in areas that have little to do with the poverty?
Many economists would think so and the WTO was set up with that rule precisely because people knew that it is an uneven playing field between the companies from rich and poor countries. Without protectionism, the nascent industries in developing nations would get crushed. Almost all major industrialised nations developed by starting out with protectionism.
> That the labels are no longer adequate in many applications is further highlighted by the fact that China is so diverse and vast that there are parts of it that are basically developed countries in their own right, judging by their per capita income levels. On the other hands, there are many provinces that are indisputably low-income by all accepted standards.
Here, you are confusing per capita and overall again. Why do labels no longer matter just because China is larger than most nations? Does per capita income no longer work the same way if the population size is larger? There are rich areas in many South American countries but no one would claim that these labels no longer matter for those nations just because there are some rich people or places. Why is it so different for China?
What really scares people about China is that it is a developing country that does not behave like a developing country. It is actually getting better, making more right moves than not, and it is setting itself up to become a major contributor to the planet's wealth. This absolutely terrifies many in the West who had always thought China would "follow the playbook" and not become much more than a corrupt, heavily indebted "workhorse economy" where manufacturing could be easily outsourced.
> There are rich areas in many South American countries but no one would claim that these labels no longer matter for those nations just because there are some rich people or places. Why is it so different for China?
The anti-China bigotry at work here by definition must take China to be exceptional. Any rational comparison of China to other nations would conclude pretty obviously that China is still, on the whole, desperately poor. But this is not about rational analysis and it probably never was.
This metric has many downsides that I'm sure others will be happy to point out, but here is an upside compared to e.g. the traditional definition: The countries wealth cannot be used for military while parts of your population starve (or have less than 12k per year, to quote the formal definition).
Edit: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PDbj62...