LDC, LDC & HIPC – development lingo & definitions
by Benjamin on March 23, 2010
I feel it’s my responsibility to notice when I am getting old and/or slow, and I think a sign is when the language of development changes under your feet. I admit not having been at the Development debate for a while – but when did LDC go from being Less Developed Country to Least Developed Country? And what does that even mean?
I noticed that the UN was talking about the North and the South two years ago, and was told that had been the lingua franca of development for a good 12 months by then. Back then, the World Bank’s HIPC – Highly Indebted Poor Countries – were the main topic of discussion, and by 2009 there were 40 countries on the list. Now it seems that the development debate is shifting to the UN, as the LDC countries are judged on 3 new criteria by the UN committee on development policy. Of course the Human Development Index is part of that indicator, as is two sets of social/structural indicators, and rather strangely, so is population size? If you have more than 75m people you can’t be an LDC, regardless of your economic situation. So that gets rid of China and India, and lets the Development debate side-step such ‘not-least’ developed countries as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Vietnam and Egypt, probably a relief for donors and theorists. Comparing LDCs and HIPC countries seems to suggest that (thanks to the Wikipedia listings) there hasn’t been a big change in priorities:
| Both LDC and HIPC | LDC | HIPC |
| Afghanistan | Angola | Bolivia |
| Benin | Bangladesh | Cameroon |
| Burkina Faso | Bhutan | Republic of the Congo |
| Central African Republic | Burundi | Côte d’Ivoire |
| Chad | Cambodia | Ghana |
| Democratic Republic of the Congo | Comoros | Guyana |
| Ethiopia | Djibouti | Kiribati |
| Gambia | East Timor | Laos |
| Guinea | Equatorial Guinea | Lesotho |
| Guinea-Bissau | Eritrea | Maldives |
| Haiti | Myanmar | Nicaragua |
| Honduras | Nepal | |
| Liberia | Samoa | |
| Madagascar | Solomon Islands | |
| Malawi | Somalia | |
| Mali | Sudan | |
| Mauritania | Tuvalu | |
| Mozambique | Vanuatu | |
| Niger | Yemen | |
| Rwanda | ||
| São Tomé and Príncipe | ||
| Senegal | ||
| Sierra Leone | ||
| Tanzania | ||
| Togo | ||
| Uganda | ||
| Zambia | ||
What should we make of all this? For starters, Wikipedia must be wrong about Bangladesh, it’s too big to be an LDC, so be careful of sources. Somewhat interestingly, the new LDC countries seem to have a lot more Asian nations than the old HIPC list did. Perhaps this is a political move to focus on the rise of Asia, or more likely its a bit of realpolitik, picking Asian nations who have neighbours that have come out of the old Less Developed country Status through a variety of methods, and not Sub-Saharan nations who have had respectable growth trajectories, but are not very good at providing ‘success stories’ for policy makers. Either way, I suspect that a new label will come along in five years, so don’t get too attached to these and just get your head down and try to do some good. Ahhh… Idealism
Tags: Development, HIPC, LDC
