Addressing the Issue of Underdevelopment Among Countries - Term Paper Example

Introduction If there is one thing that every country in this world strives to achieve then it is development. To say the least, almost all countries are divided according to their levels of development. Africa is therefore said to be the country with the least level of development. The West is said to be the epitome of political and socioeconomic success. With development, citizens of a country are assured of the best living standards, good quality life that is, and more so proper human rights. While it is not right, or credible to say that a country is not developed (since development is absolute and highly dependent on how the West defines it), there is importance to note that there really are countries lagging very far behind what everybody should term as “per” when it comes to their understanding of what development should really look like. This paper, therefore, will be looking at why some countries are said to be underdeveloped. What causes underdevelopment that is. Discussion The task will go deep into what underdevelopment are its causes, its importance to development, to any country to work toward it. This way, it will become clear to have a multifaceted approach on underdevelopment and therefore understand vividly the underlying factors that limit countries from being developed and thus be said to be underdeveloped. A developed country, to begin with, is that that provides high living standards of living for its people due to having reasonable per capita income and Gross Natural product (Bas, 2012). Looking at most countries in the West, the reader would realize that they have developed resources, talk of factors of production such as labour (which they have high skilled) and can therefore produce their own capital and have little to no limitations as to how they make use of this financial resources since they have ample of that. A country like this has its people lead a life free from poverty or some other negative situations that come because of poverty, say unbalanced diet or little access to health facilities. A country like Britain, for instance, is a developed country. Very few individuals live under a dollar a day and their transport and communication (infrastructure) is high class. Taking a look at a country from the sub-Saharan Africa, say Somalia, then it is clear that the difference between the living standards of the occupants of these two countries differ as if heaven is from hell (Luchsinger, 2012). The aforementioned Somalia has its citizens live under a dollar a day, below the poverty line that is. The country, plus most others from the region and more others from Latin America and Asia, are said to be caught up in a vicious cycle of poverty. In this case, they do not have the investment required to increase the levels of production and they therefore end up having less to no production even from agriculture. A situation like this leads to economic stagnation and the country in question has no chance of developing even its health facilities, leave alone its infrastructure. Since underdevelopment, and development are manmade, it goes without saying that development is therefore achievable to any country, as manmade solutions would help address underdevelopment. While underdevelopment may be caused by the a number of specific factors as will be mentioned below, a wider approach may be seen with how W. W. Rostow (1960) describe the stages of development. According to him, development occurs in five distinct stages. Actually, all countries must be in one of the stages of development. Rostow discusses them starting with the first stage, the traditional society. The traditional society is characterised by limited production structure and technology. In other words, at this stage, the tools used for production are poor and the level of production is significantly low, actually meant for subsistence only. Machines such as tractors do not exist and fertiliser is not a known commodity. Refrigeration of food does not exist and there is not even that need to have such facilities since the production itself is very low. This situation is common in the sub-Saharan Africa where most farmers do not engage in commercial farming but rather growing of subsistence food, maize, beans, potatoes, and peas to be precise. The second stage of development, according to Rostow, is precondition for take-off where the society is a bit evolved and actually ready to get to the modern stage. At this stage, the society engages itself in industry and education becomes a necessity leading to an importance in economic and political progress. When proper conditions are met, the society enters the take-off stage, a state that is akin to industrial revolution, which is characterised by high growth of the agricultural sector, and industries develop faster than before. At this point, an innovative class of entrepreneurs’ surface. After this, the society enters the fourth stage, the drive to maturity stage, which is a situation where technology becomes an important aspect to the society and there is an interest in engaging in international economics. As there is a demand for more sophisticated products, international trade becomes crucial and the society thus shifts from the initial heavy engineering. Lastly, the society enters the fifth stage, the age of high mass-consumption. This is the stage where developed countries are said to be. It is a situation where there is an increased level of real income and a high population growth. In addition, while knowledge is seen to spread much faster than it did in the previous stages, the society demands more specialisation and demand for the primary needs increases. Looking at the above stages of development, a person would realize that there is more to it than meets the eye. The developing world is definitely not expected to go through all the stages as the West did. To begin with, infrastructure, industrialization, and technology available are not the same in Africa as it were in England in the 1800s. Societies are different today that they were before the age of industrialization. There are a number of factors that lead to underdevelopment mostly in the Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Overpopulation, however, can be said to be the most common. One of the features of developing countries (read underdeveloped) is an explosion of their population. There are a number of negative things mentioned concerning high population growths of third world countries as discussed below. To begin with, a high population growth means that a country ratio of the working class to the dependents is very high. If a family, for instance, has high fertility rates, which translates to high population growth, then there may be a situation where a mother and a father have about seven children to support. Generally, this is a bad idea in that the children may not have the chance get a balanced diet (Boyle, 2013). If the children have no access to proper food, then there will be a weaker future generation. Nutritional diseases such as kwashiorkor may face such children if they have no access to proteins. Such children form an unhealthy generation and a very weak population, which, unfortunately, does not translate to a proper situation for any development to take place. High fertility also leads to the parents being unable to provide the highest level of education for the children. In most cases when a parent is unable to support their children, they may be forced to choose whom they take to school and who stays at home to take care of the younger siblings (Kragbe, 2003). In most cases, the girl child is usually who is sacrificed as their education is most parts of the world is seen as less important to that of a boy. In short, the girl would end up being married off and therefore educating her is simply a waste of resources. While there are still those that would go to school, evidently, there are children who would do even better and grow up to becoming great people in the society but they do not have the chance to do that. In other words, many children do not grow to become engineers, doctors, nurses, pilots, lawyers, teachers, and leaders they would have grown to be. Unfortunately, the population growth is still high as the countries are having less mortality and infant death rates due to advances in healthcare and proper nutrition. Gender issues are unmistakably other reasons why most countries in the aforementioned regions are facing underdevelopment. Gender, which basically refers to the social and cultural definition of what being a man or a woman is in regard to the roles ascribed to each one of them, has seen a situation where men and women are presented with different difficulties and challenges, and as we are going to see, greatly affects development. Gender imbalance is one of the issues involved here and cuts across subjects such as how resources are distributed in a community and how men and women, boys and girls have access to the resources, and whether they can control them. Studying gender, one would come across topics such as Women in Development (WID), gender, and development (GAD) (Aulette, 2012). Looking at most developed countries in the world, something that is very predominant is the fact that men and women are ‘equal’, equal in that they have equal access to education, jobs, opportunities, and so on. In other words, they have equal; access to opportunities and rights. Third world countries have different words to say here. Women are normally denied most fundamental rights of any human being. In addition, they have few freedoms and opportunities presented to them. To say the least, women are denied the right to own or control property. While it should be a parent’s business to decide whether their daughters inherit any property, mostly land as the factor of production, most communities in the sub-Saharan Africa do not allow that and women are left with no choice but to use that that their husbands own. If women do not have access to land (that is cannot own land whilst deciding how it is used) then that is a big problem as women do most of the work around the farm, actually over 70% (Samanta, 1995). Denying them land means that they do not partake farming as much as they would if they had access to land and therefore the total agricultural output of the country is hampered. Food becomes scarce and the population starves. Low production in agriculture already is under development and less and less of it translates to weaker population with no access cash, which they could use to help their children acquire an education and good healthcare if they sold the surplus. Looking at some external factors would also help in shedding light to why there is definitely a problem in how most developed countries still have problems developing. The Breton Wood institutions, that is the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) introduce the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) to the developing countries when they offered the countries loans and the SAPs have brought about huge impacts in the development of these states (Balassa, 1984). Unfortunately, the impacts have been negative. To mention a good policy is forcing the countries to grow cash crops as they did to Kenya. When a country focuses more on the growing of cash crops and neglecting food crops, then the country starves (Bonilla, 2006). Men normally control cash crops while women control food crops since they are responsible for feeding the families. More growth of a crop that the men control is a sure path to underdevelopment- children will end up malnourished. Conclusion, There are a myriad of factors that leads to underdevelopment. Overpopulation, gender imbalance, no access to proper education, balance diet, and lastly unfavorable international policies are some of the causes of underdevelopment. Addressing all these issues are the reasons the West is as developed as it is today. Bibliography Aulette, Judy Root, and Judith G. Wittner. Gendered Worlds. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2012. Balassa, Bela A., and F. Desmond McCarthy. Adjustment Policies in Developing Countries, 1979-1983: An Update. Washington, D.C., U.S.A.: World Bank, 1984. Bas, Tomas Gabriel. Comparing High Technology Firms in Developed and Developing Countries: Cluster Growth Initiatives. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2012. Bonilla, Eugenio. WTO Negotiations and Agricultural Trade Liberalization the Effect of Developed Countries' Policies on Developing Countries. Wallingford, UK: CABI Pub., 2006. Boyle, Marie A., and David H. Holben. Community Nutrition in Action: An Entrepreneurial Approach. 6th Ed., Student ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2013. Kragbe, Benedict D. The Causes of Underdevelopment in Liberia. Facs. ed. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2003. Luchsinger, Gretchen. Somalia Human Development Report 2012 Empowering Youth for Peace and Development. Nairobi: United Nations Development Programme, 2012. Rostow, W. W. The Stages of Economic Growth, a Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge [England: University Press, 1960. Samanta, R. K. Women in Agriculture: Perspective, Issues and Experiences. New Delhi: M D Publications, 1995. Read More