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MEDCs and
LEDCs
Dr Andrew Lee
How kinds of countries are named
More and Less Economically Developed Country (MEDC and LEDC) are terms
used to describe countries according to their economic status. Separating
countries into two groups will always be difficult. Some countries will clearly
belong to one group or another, but those in the middle will be harder to
classify. A country’s economic development relates to the degree to which it
has a high income, but often other things will come along with a high income
such as good infrastructure (roads, banks, ports etc) stable government
(freedom of speech, democracy) etc.
There are other ways to broadly classify countries, and these include the older
division of First, Second and Third World countries and the more modern
measure called HDI.
HDI (Human Development Index) is a group of statistics which together form a
number which is used to ‘measure’ the overall development of a country. This
includes education, GDP per person, life expectancy and literacy. This measure
has been criticised for not considering the country’s ecological record.
Measures of this type are always imprecise. This does not, however, mean that
the measures are not useful. They are useful when broad decisions or
comparisons have to be made, even though there are gaps in what they are
able to fully describe.