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Standard of Living
Comparing Canada to the World
PLO’s – Human Geography
• Compare Canada’s Standard of Living with those
of developing countries, with reference to
poverty and key indicators of human
development
• Specifically, what indicators are used by the UN
to measure Living Standards
• Also, what can be done to improve standards
(life expectancy, etc.)
The UN Human Development Report
Figure 14-1, pg. 341, Fig. 14-2, pg. 342
• An index that ranks countries on three
measures: adult literacy, life expectancy and per
capita GDP
• GDP is total value of all goods and services
produced in a country in one year
• Divide that number by a country’s population
and you have per capita GDP
• This report is a crude indicator of levels of
economic and social development – countries
that rank high are developed and affluent (low
rank equals poor development and growth)
Developed Nations
• This term refers to nations that are
industrialized, with their people well-housed,
healthy, and educated
• Well developed infrastructure such as
communication and transportation systems,
electrical grid, schools and hospitals
• DEVELOPING countries lack modern
infrastructure and industry
Comparing Living Standards
(Food PPT!)
• Difficult to do sometimes
• Non-monetary transactions are difficult to trace
– this makes measuring economic output in
developing countries difficult
• Wealth can be unevenly distributed – ie. Saudi
Arabia with mega-rich and extreme poor – skews
statistics
• Quality of life includes health (infant mortality,
etc), nutrition, status of women – these are
supplied by gov’ts of wealthy nations, not in the
poor – hard to account for
Poverty
• Estimates are controversial, but some measures
suggest that ~1.3 billion people live below the
poverty line (in the Developing World that
equates to earning less than $1 per day)
• The poverty line is different in Canada, due to
greater cost of living – here we measure by
people having to spend more than 56% of their
income on life’s necessities
• Figure estimated that 5.1 million Canadians were
in this category
Developing World Poverty
• Greatly related to inability to purchase food
• Also, debt is a major problem
• The debts of these nations are linked to loans
that were granted – western nations wanted to
help these countries develop their infrastructure
– dams, highways, etc
• However, many developing countries have been
unable to repay these debts, and now payments
on these debts take up huge amounts of budgets
– money that can’t be spent on education,
health, development programs, etc
Poverty Cycle
• See p. 347 text for detailed version
• On a basic level, poor healthcare and nutrition
leads to developmental difficulties, which causes
problems in literacy and academic progress
• This leads to reduced ability to be successful in
the workplace, leading to poor wages, poor diet
and health, young marriage often occurs as well,
with poor job prospects
• Families are forced into debt and poverty,
leading to malnourished babies, completing the
cycle
• The key to breaking this cycle is improved
education and nutrition/healthcare
Solutions
• Since WWII, the developed world has been
providing aid (money, etc) to the developing
world
• Aid is dwarfed by military expenditures however
• Comes in a variety of forms
• Multilateral Aid: funded by a number of gov’ts,
usually for large scale projects
• Tied Aid: conditions are attached, like purchasing
goods from certain companies, etc
• Aid is received from many sources: UN, CIDA and
NGO’s like Oxfam and Rotary