Unpacking the ‘Developing’ Country Classification | Deborah Barros Leal Farias

The division of the world into ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries has grown increasingly problematic in the past decades. Nonetheless, it remains embedded in legal documents, foreign policy discourse, and colloquial use. In this lecture, Dr Deborah explores this complexity by unpacking the different ways in which the ‘developing’ label is used in the international system, arguing that understanding the complexity around its use requires a rigorous analysis of the label’s diverse meanings and consequences.

Deborah Barros Leal Farias is a Brazilian-born Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney's School of Social Sciences, where she teaches Politics and International Relations. She has a multidisciplinary background: PhD in Political Science from UBC (Canada), as well as an MA in International Relations, a bachelor degree in Economy and another in Law, all from Brazilian institutions. Her current main areas of interest involve hierarchy in global governance, particularly the interaction of non-great powers in international organizations, and Brazilian politics.

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Intro music Anna Banana by Eaters

Transcript

And basically this is the meat, right? This is the most important part that really I'm here to talk to you guys about, which is this the idea of unpacking the developing country classification: origins and hierarchies? Just so you know, the keywords, with the puns intended there, this is essentially not just the keywords for the paper, but this is basically the key words of most of the stuff that I'm interested right now at the moment. I was saying to Shamel earlier, there was a portion of my work that's now getting smaller where I was researching populism in Brazil, Brazil, I go tomorrow. Unfortunately, the only good thing Bolsonaro brought me was publications and citations. Other than that, it was an utter disaster. But anyway, this is really the bulk of the things that I'm interested in. Developing countries as the main category. And then I'm looking at the interaction of all these different elements. So this is the paper. So with RIPE, and if you want to download the paper, you can just put there in the in the QR code. It's, it's open access. I just, I just feel like so tech savvy because I made this QR code and I don't feel ancient yet. Although, anyway, I digress. Okay, so this is basically the the, the summary of this paper. But I just want to point out that I have been publishing other things. So some of these things I've published also this year. This one where I talk about these multiple hierarchies, where I'm looking at the idea of the civilized world and this ranking in the International Labor Organization when it was created, super fascinating case. This other one that came out this year, that's more in the environmental space, which is differentiation in environmental treaties with Charlie Roger, who's over at IBEI in Barcelona. This one is country differentiation also on environment. But I'm looking more specifically on some key environmental treaties and ideas, and I'm looking at how specifically they go about categorizing who's developing what. And then another one that also has a lot of material, which is which countries. So this one, this last one, it's it's really a bigger picture of a research that I'm doing. At the very end of the presentation I'll show you where you can find all of these things. I mean, they're all on Google Scholar. But also the data that I use to kind of come up with all the stuff and the things that I'm researching. So for this particular paper, the the question really that prompted this paper is this one is why is the developing country classification so contentious? And to me, this this comes about almost, I mean, if I really want to go back this big experience, it has to do in many ways, like growing up in Brazil, doing all my bachelor's degree and master's being in Latin America. I never grew up really with the world has always been divided into first world, third world, rich, poor, developed, developing. We've always used these terms and you know, you grow up using them as very, very naturally. It's so much and I didn't realize that until really as an adult, you know,.I went to Canada and just see how different it was. But you, you can't call the countries developing because that's bad. And for me, in my mind, it's like, wait, But that's how countries say that they are. Like, that's how they identify, that's how their foreign policy actually operates. So it it began to cross my mind like this is confusing. And also having the idea of talking about Global South and global North. I have nothing against those terms the same way that I don't think anybody should have anything preemptively against developed or developing because there are these different understandings. What I find particularly interesting about developing and I know that a lot of people cringe because they're like, Oh, that's that's old. That's like Cold War or, you know, nonaligned movement. That's, you know, the really 60/70s language. Nobody uses that anymore. My claim is to say this still remains used in language in pretty much every international organization that I looked at. They don't really talk about countries as global south and north. So you'll see it in reports. But when you go and see that really the nuts and bolts of what they're talking about and most of them still use developed and developing, but more importantly, in all of the research I've done, I'm yet to see a legal document like a treaty that actually divides the world into global north and global South. I have found none. If anybody knows an example do send me. And the other one is that countries self-identify. So take China, Brazil and India if you want. These three, they don't call themselves Global South. They call themselves developing. And so politically, even if someone says, I don't like using it or I think it's passé, countries still use it. And for me, it's almost like if it's still if it has legal worth, because that's what the legal document is saying. And if countries are using it politically, it still matters. So that's my justification of looking at developing and developed and not global South and Global North. So the argument that I have here in this paper is to say using the word developing to label countries can reflect distinct ontological assumptions. That's kind of the core of why it's complicated. It's because they're essentially using you can use the same label, developing country, developed country to essentially be talking about different things. So what I think really happens is that you have a lot of conversations that are talking past each other because people are coming from different perspectives on how they perceive that label. And sometimes people aren't aware that others are taking it from a different angle. And so that's why there's this dissonance. The assumptions. So the assumptions is that it's drawing from different origins, and the result is that it also creates different hierarchies. So that's really what I explore in the paper. What I mean by different origins is going to be clear. In some cases countries say I am developing. While in others you have an outsider, whether it's an organization or a country, a researcher, and say that country is developed. Those are two very different dynamics. And the use of, why are they using it in terms of looking at hierarchy, it really can create like it can have different meanings and it has different uses, reasons for uses. So interacting with hierarchies, that's what it is. As a good political scientist I made a two by two matrix. Which I think if you've never done a two by two matrix, it's only a matter of time. This is a nerd joke. One day you'll understand if you've never done a two by two matrix. But anyway, this is what I did with the typology of looking at origins and hierarchies. When I talk about origins, what I mean is who is doing the classification, what is the origin? Is it the country itself, or is it an outside actor? Is it someone who's looking and they are saying that is developing? So this is what I mean by origins. And in terms of hierarchy, I use Metron and Oracles. They have a lot of stuff that's also published on hierarchies and it's more looking into what are the implications. So I kind of adapt what they're talking about in broad hierarchies and their origins to say, okay, so what? So what is, what is the consequence of this? So essentially you have hierarchy and origins. And what I do is that with origins I use and divide it in two, external, so someone is saying, I'm saying or I think that country in developing and in the case of an internal origin, is you have the country self-identifying. So the country is saying, this is how I see myself or this is how I position myself. In terms of hierarchy, you're looking at narrow and broad. These are terms that are used by Metron and Oracles that are called which I adopt here essentially with narrow. In my case, what I'm looking at is basically formalized. These are formal hierarchies. You can what I mean explicit boundaries is that you can go in a somewhere and find a list. Right. There's a list. This is a list of developed countries. This is the list of developing countries. It's really you know, where where is South Korea? Where is Russia, Where is Ukraine? Where is it Chile? You'll find a list. It's explicit there. In many cases, not all, but in many cases, this has legal consequences. And especially if you're in a legal context, you have to say these are the countries that will like, say, have to pay contributions or something else, or these are the countries who are going to have a special treatment, for whatever reason. And what I mean by broad is that basically this is not formal and this is really about a hierarchy that is subjective. That it is contextual that it is politically based. So it's more of the abstract that you're talking about. You're not going to find a list and say, this is the Global South, but to say the idea of the global South so that would be sort of an example. And essentially this matrix generates these four pieces essential that I look in the paper, which I call technocratic, elective, northern gaze and southern solidarity. Which I'll go, and again, the paper, you can find everything. So let's starting with the technocratic, with a narrow hierarchy and external rights. So it's narrow in the sense that you're really looking at a positivistic epistemological. So think of something that, let's say generally has objective or tries to have objective indicators or boundaries. So you have thresholds, you have benchmarks. The World Bank is kind of a really good case because you say, okay, if you're high income, it's 13,000, I don't know how many dollars. It's G2, It's gross national income per capita measured by the Atlas method, which is essentially uses exchange rates. This is a way of saying this is a very specific way, this was chosen, this criteria, and therefore these are divided. I put objective there with air quotes, with quotes because none of them are actually objective. All of them have a subjective element. So this is something that's I mean, it's another discussion, but it's really it's it's part of it's apolitical in the sense that obviously it's also not apolitical. There's a lot of politics into this, but it kind of goes with this idea of ideals being neutral, apolitical, you know, places they generate neutral expertise, they generate expertise, and their expertise is neutral. That's also unsurprising why a lot of people, when they're using don't use the World Bank. don't use the IMF. There's there's a couple of things if you need a list, right. It's the idea of which list am I going to use? This is typically the one that is used very common to have numerical based criteria. So you have know specific numbers. There's the fetish of numbers. That numbers appear to be more objective. In the paper that I published, the one on the ILO, I'm biased, but it's a cool paper. It's a fascinating paper because it was actually the first time that any international organization, so this is between 1919 and 1922, they they decided to say the countries that are the decision makers in the International Labor Organization are the eight countries that are of chief industrial importance. As you can imagine, the question was how do you define which countries are of chief industrial importance? And one of the curious anecdotes is that they actually got who at the time was already a well known statistician, Corrado Gini, of the Gini index much later on, to kind of go and do you know and say, okay, what are the countries how do we choose? especially who gets the last spots anyway? This is a really fun stuff. Examples International labor organization in their decision making body, they don't use the ILO doesn't really use this this classification side of things. The IMF, the World Bank, the universal postal union which sounds super boring and almost all students are like, why would I care about the universal postal union? Well, not now, But later on, if you Google UPU and Trump, there's a list of articles, news articles talking about how Trump wanted to leave the universal postal union, which is one of the very, very first international organizations that has about 150 years, was created still in the 19th century. And the reason is because he thought that the threshold that the UPU was using. I mean, Postal Service sounds boring. But when you think e-commerce. E-commerce is still. You know, there's a post person who will come to deliver whatever you buy from Amazon and whatnot. And so there's enormous implications when it comes to e-commerce. And essentially, Trump was saying that he was going to leave the organization if they didn't change the threshold, essentially saying China's getting a much better deal than they should because China is considered, you know, falling under a developing kind of category. And he considered that to be unfair. So this is the kind of stuff that, you know, makes my nerd heart beat faster because this is fun. Anyway, contestation usually is around a bureaucratic solution, because a lot of these cases you have bureaucrats, you have civil servants who are the ones that, you know, are kind of doing this and coming up with this. But it doesn't mean that it's not political. Take the case of the UPU and you can see really, really when things get complicated, kind of the technical staff gets pushed to the side and really countries will come in because they know the importance of the power to be determining this thresholds. Contestation will always exist. It is normal. You shouldn't think of it as something going wrong because things change the world change. So maybe a criteria that was very valid. So something like manufacturing that was very valid in 1960. Nowadays, in 2023, it might not really be that important. You might be looking at, well, general manufacturing, who cares? You want to see tech or you want to see? And countries will change over time, or the things that matter will change. So this is kind of normal to always have this. But the difference is that in this case, contestation really generally is not in the existence of these thresholds, but it's just that these thresholds should be better or tinkered with or added or it's a it's more of an editing kind of goal. And then we move to the second one, which in my analysis here is a narrow hierarchy, but an internal origin, which in this case the difference is that you still have a list. So there's still this formal element of separating developed from developing. But this is about countries getting to say how they will label themselves. And more importantly, this is valid for a particular context in the sense that in this narrow hierarchy, countries are essentially saying, I'm going to put myself in this category, but this is not expected to have any other repercussions than the legal repercussion attached to this particular document. Countries here are choosing, so they have the option to choose. Legally binding only to that particular document with no implications. So this is not about how a country sees itself in the world. It's because it's about how it wants to see itself in that particular space, in that particular rule. GATT WTO is the best example I actually found again, God Bless the gods of digitalizing, you know, archival material. I actually found the the meetings, the meeting minutes from GATT when they were trying to decide, you know, when they have like the part or and so special different differentiated treatment for developing countries. Essentially they said, okay, developing countries are going to come in and they can have all these advantages. Everybody agreed. And then at a certain point in the meeting they're like, okay, but how do we define how do we decide which countries are developing or not? They couldn't come with the solution. And so essentially they said for the time being, countries will tell, right? Countries will voice what their position is. And back in 1964, 1965, that seemed unquestionable, although they did say, you know, this is supposed to be revisited at another moment and essentially path dependency, whatever reasons, they never look back. But the Convention  on Biological Diversity is a really interesting example because the WTO, we always or the tendency a lot of the literature has decreed that developing countries are taking advantage, that nowadays they're free riding this structure and just, you know, they want to stay because they have from a very I.R. language, like they're really it's about, you know, they're thinking of self interest, they're thinking of material gains. But the Convention on Biological Diversity goes into a really different direction because here you actually have one of the smallest I didn't include here in this set, but it has one of the smallest number of all of the documents that I looked at. And this is the smallest one. This one is interesting because countries have to come forward and identify themselves as a developed. It's one of the very few that has to do that. And so far, less than 30 countries have actually come to say I am developed in the context of the CVD, which imposes certain financial obligations for those who do so. Which creates weird things like Liechtenstein is not has not chosen to be one of these countries that is considered developed. So if you do a really binary setting, then Liechtenstein with one of the highest GDP per capita in the world would be developing by default. So it's pretty strange. The UNFCCC so kind of in this way, but there are things those countries, I think it's Kazakhstan that has asked to be put into the Annex two category, the one that actually has payments and Turkey is one that for a long time had really thought not to be among the OECD countries that were already considered developed and that had to pay. And so it's sort of but I mean, if you look into the paper, you'll see these examples. There's actually less room. I argue for contestation for accommodation because it's an either/or. Right. It's not like in other cases where I don't think this threshold is correct. Instead of 13,000, it should be 14,000 or 11,000. There's no bandwidth to play. It's either a country has developed or developing. And what happens in these cases is that you really begin to have a sense of path dependency, that it's harder for countries to be switching sides. And I mean, the ultimate case, which would be, for example, again Trump and in the World Trade Organization, was almost say, well, you know what, I'm going to I'm going to leave. If we can't find a way to find, you know, this becomes really a much bigger challenge because you have to overhaul the entire system. You don't have this room to maneuver. 

We come to the third one, which is the northern gaze. This is the one that it's the cringiest one. When you think of developing countries in a cringe way, in a way that is not good. This is usually what I'm talking about. Which is, it's it's a diffuse thing. There's not a specific list. There's not a specific name, but it's almost I don't know if you guys some people might know the story that happened in in the United States. I think it was in the early set, late sixties, early seventies, when it came all the way up to the Supreme Court, a case I think it it it involved Hustler magazine and the definition of what was pornography. And if you think about it like, how do you separate pornography from art? How do you separate pornography from anatomy? And there's a really famous quote by one of the US Supreme Court justices that essentially said, I know it when I see it. So it's this idea of, well, it's it's hard to make it tangible and really there but there's this feeling. And in this case, what I'm talking about as external, it means that someone is designating someone else. I think this. I think China should be a developed country. I think South Korea should be a developed. No, I think South Korea should be developing those. Those people will have like if I ask this rule, where do you think Russia would fit? Where do you think Ukraine would sit? Where do you think Chile or Uruguay? There's a there's a whole range of countries. There's Israel also which gets classified in a different way. Not really structured in terms of criteria, clear boundaries, basically in the eye of the beholder. I see. And I feel. I think. That's essentially what you have. What I argue and this is actually one of those I'm working on a book proposal now, and I say one of the origins, if you look really at the core of the origin of the label itself, like where when did it become it used? What I argue is that one of the issues with the label is that it became a very convenient substitute for uncivilized because up until the mid 1940s there was no normative question that countries were named uncivilized. But after World War Two, especially after decolonization, the context of the Cold War, by the 1950s, it becomes less and less "okay". Politically, normatively, to call countries uncivilized and the language is essentially dead like this particular language, essentially dead in the very early 1960s. I do this like I traced. You know, looking at material in the UN. from 1945 to about 1960 and you could really see just how it was still used. But it just dramatically falls. And what I argue, what I'm going to argue in the book. Is that one of the problems is this.is that by the 1960s, calling a country developing became the easiest way to call a country essentially uncivilized. But using a word that was accepted. So whether it was intentional or not, it did end up getting to this this, you know, pigeonholed or, I don't know, just juxtaposed with a different way. Although it is also in the sixties where the other case that we're going to talk about also happens. Anyway the United Nations has a standard code called UN standards called N49, and they only changed after December 2021, so less than two years ago. But they essentially had a list as well where you could find these are developed countries, these are developing countries, with no criteria. And when I mean no criteria, there's no criteria. It just says, well, these are countries that are commonly considered or treated as developed. And it was basically. OEC membership in the 1980s and very few countries were changed in their classification over time. They stopped using that one, just as I said recently. But the UNDP also has the same. If you look at their list, the UNDP lists all developing countries. It doesn't have a list for developed, which is quite interesting. So essentially developed as by default from their list. You also go into the website,you go to the material, I emailed people there and they said, 'We just don't have a criteria'. So at some point some bureaucrat, I guess, or a group of people, nothing against bureaucrats, but I'm just saying this is something that was not based on, you know, let's do criteria and analysis and see, you know, this one is going to fall here. it was just like we're going to label these countries as developing and the International Renewable Energy Agency also in the. So these are just examples of some that I've actually reached out to their, you know, the folks that work there and say, hey, I can't find anything in the website, I can find it in the material. And essentially they said, yeah, we've just never had like we put this list and, you know, so far no one has complained. So it just kept there. OECD, membership is an interesting case here because it's typically used as a big reference, right? A lot of folks use OECD membership as kind of the guideline, pretty much high income and OECD membership or some of the two most common ways of saying these are developed, the rest and developed, but OECD membership has a couple of things for anyone thinking there to consider. Very much.It was publically the rich and really about a specific group of countries that were wealthy, etc., especially until the 1990s. Or even in the 2000. But in the past 15 years, the organization has really, quote, has increased in its membership. In the last 15 years, eight new countries have joined. And a lot of countries that are joining are not countries that many people would have, you know, in their bingo card for countries they would consider developed. The two newest members, for instance, are Colombia and Costa Rica. Which made me write a little piece where I say that the OECD is becoming the organization of the un poquito rich countries because it's not really about being rich or wealthy. It's about following the the atlas, the the set of rules that's under the OECD. And then all of the it's really about good governance. It's there's no there's you look at the criteria, you look at everything. There's no really relational economic things. And mind you, Brazil, along with Peru, are also currently having their cases for membership being reviewed formally. So although this might take, you know, probably going to take years, five years, seven years, I think I think Colombia is like seven years for them to actually join. That's going to be a bit tricky for folks who are looking at OECD, the membership as a reference for developed because then you're really going to have Brazil, whose population is second only to the United States in the OECD context, right. With 210 million people, that's really going to skew a lot of the OECD data. That's that's what I think. So something to keep in mind. The contestation generally is to say, look, this tends to be patronizing. This tends to be outdated. This is essentially a regurgitated view of civilized and uncivilized. A lot of people don't like this because it's the idea that it's not just a label. It's all of the things that are embedded in the label in terms of inferiority, in terms of backwardness, all of these negative characteristics. So that's why this one is really particular. 

But as you can see, completely different from the last case we're looking at, which I call southern solidarity, still a broad hierarchy. There's not necessarily a list there, but it's really internal. And in this case it's about countries self-identifying, but it's self-identifying not so much in the legal sense, but is in their foreign policy identity. They will engage in South-South cooperation. They will say, you know, I am a developing country. They will use this language in their foreign policies. The criteria is basically inter subjectivity, is a country's saying, you know, I belong in this group, I don't belong with those guys. Which table do I sit, you know, who are my natural kind of peers that I'll gravitate towards? And this is really about this is what I'm going to argue. in the book proposal, and saying this is the separate origin that I'm also looking at with the developing label, which really begins already right after the U.N. is created, especially with Latin American countries that really incorporated the language. There's a lot of agency there that I think that gets missed. Latin American countries especially, but not only. India and China, also having a really important role there, to say we are, we're developing and we need more development. They actually didn't use developing, they used underdeveloped. That was really the word that was used. And essentially what I what I looked at to the documents of that in the 1950s as you begin a process of decolonization. Well in the forties and fifties, but especially towards the you know as the fifties goes on counties becoming independent and really looking around and saying, where's the group? Like, where do I fit? And essentially seeing the gravitating towards this group that was already using the developing identity in the 1940s. If anybody is curious, there's a lot of interesting stuff on this about the International Trade Organization. We have the World Trade Organization. The International Trade Organization was one that was never really created. In 1948, the US Senate rejected the treaty. It's called the Havana Charter. I absolutely recommend if someone is more interested in the historical stuff because they really, really talk about developing countries or underdeveloped countries. So it has a long history. This is an inner ethos. It's a sense of collectivity, a sense of belonging. It's really a political stance and a worldview. It's essentially the idea of poor and periphery. The world is divided into the haves and the have nots, and we are the have nots, and we're the ones who have to come together and use our power to leverage and really change. So. G77, The nonaligned movement essentially also has this kind of positioning. Contestation nowadays would be probably about I think it has to do still with the inter subjectivity. China, for example, is in this sense where it fully identifies itself as developing, but it's running the risk more and more of being called, you know, hypocrisy or hypocrite or illegitimate in the sense that can it still claim that it is a developing country? So this is interesting because it's not just about a country positioning itself, but it's the inter-subjectivity of others also recognizing and saying, yes, you do belong. You are a part of it. And so, again, this is the the big picture. You can imagine how, for instance, the the different epistemologies of technocratic and southern solidarity, really crash. This is why I think ultimately when it comes to implications and contestations a couple of key points to take away, categories they have an important role in producing, contesting and or reinforcing power, both material and symbolic, whether it's intentional or not, because all of them are really not. But the end up being. Labels can evoke and attribute power and powerlessness. So Amrita Narlikar has some really interesting stuff on the idea of powerlessness, and it's really interesting how you can also flip the sense of countries actually trying to leverage power by saying we are the collective have not. We are the collective powerless. And because if you think of it in some ways is why wouldn't every country, if they can opt symbolically, why wouldn't they  say I'm actually developed? There's nothing stopping them from saying if you consider that to be the top tier or, you know, the place where everybody wants to be, to say, no, I don't maybe I don't want to be there. You know, that's so there's interesting stuff. Awareness. This is one of the most important things, is that not all? I think this is something that everybody can take away is that when you write a paper, when you give a talk, when you're reading stuff, not all people will interpret the label in the same way. Someone can be like me coming from Brazil, I'm going to be looking at to me, that really resonates with the idea have/have nots, core periphery, you know Raul Prebisch, all of those things probably indoctrinated there in my head as I studied economics in Brazil in the 1990, which can be completely different from someone who has studied a lot more recently in Europe and really is accustomed to looking at Global North or South, or someone who just really from an economic base and they're looking at, you know, very specific views on criteria. 

And if there's one takeaway that I would finish, is this one, which I mentioned in the beginning, is that even if all international organizations and scholars stopped using, as long as countries continue to embrace developing in their foreign policy, seek power as a group. And didn't put it there, but that it's legal. It is on paper, it has legal impact. The label still matters. Theoretically and empirically, I'm not saying that you should all change your text and ditch global north and global south. That's not the point. But it's just that when you're using the terms to to really be aware that in some cases the correct word is actually developing and not necessarily the book itself. So it depends there. And finally, I will pitch one of the, you know, the database where I have this material. I haven't officially launched it, I think. I think so Maybe today kind of making sort of an official launch. But you go there and it's called www.DevelopingCountries.info. Where essentially I have a database here at the top where you have. Where you have home. If you go here and into criteria, I can't click here because this is just a screengrab. But when you go to criteria, it lists about 60 different IOs, treaties and generalized systems of preference and compare how each one essentially what is their criteria for separating, developed oe developing. This one here is a lot of fun, is essentially you can go and this is a spreadsheet. I have to update it because I haven't updated it for the latest World Bank changes, because World Bank changes every year. But essentially, it's a database where I have all 193 U.N. members plus seven more like Kosovo, Taiwan. I want I wanted to round up in 200 and about 15 different lists where I compare every single country and how every single country is. You know, how how are they classified? And you can really see that of the 200 cases that I looked at, roughly 60, which is a really big number, and have at least one at least one case where one of the organizations lists them differently than I have here with the publications. I also have to upload there's the this one, the recent one, which is not there yet and then contact and yeah and that is that is it.