DVCs

Developing countries (DVCs) are the world’s least industrialized nations heavily committed to agriculture. They have low level of literacy, high unemployment, rapid population growth and their exports are largely agricultural or raw materials. Capital equipment is scarce, production technologies are primitive, and productivity is low. More than 60% of the world’s population lives in these nations, which can be divided into two groups.

a. The first group consists of middle-income countries. These are home to 75% of the world’s population and 62% of the world’s poor in 2020. They are further divided into two: lower middle-income and upper middle-income economies based on their gross national income (GNI).

• lower middle-income economies - those with a GNI per capita between $1,036 and $4,045 in 2021.

• upper middle-income economies - those with a GNI per capita between $4,046 and $12,535 in 2021.

b. The low-income countries are countries with GNI per capita of $1,025 or less in 2018. Dominating this group in 2020 are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and the sub-Saharan African nations.

Many DVCs such as China, Malaysia and Thailand have achieved high annual growth rates in their GDPs in recent decades and have moved out of low-income to lower middle-income. Meanwhile, previous DVCs, such as South Korea, and Singapore have achieved impressive success and became high-income countries