Have you ever lived in or learned about another country and felt that its development today resembles where your own country was decades ago? Or wondered when your country might reach the living standards you see elsewhere? Many of us make informal mental time comparisons like these.
In a new paper, we quantify in time the level of development across countries. Quantifying development in terms of time offers a powerful perspective of development gaps. One country may be 20 years behind another in health outcomes and 10 years behind in education outcomes. The use of time to measure progress allows for simple comparisons across different development indicators, countries, and stages of development.
So how do we calculate these time distances? We analyzed cross-country data for six key indicators for which we could find data going back to 1950, these being extreme poverty, life expectancy, years of schooling, women's political empowerment, electricity supply, and carbon intensity of the economy. For each indicator, we mapped out a typical development path. This path shows the expected journey from the worst-observed outcomes to the best based on the collective experience of all countries over the last 75 years (see an interactive visual explanation of the method here).
This framework allows us to estimate the number of years from one country to another, or from a country to a milestone under the typical speed of development experienced since 1950. We define an "advanced development benchmark" based on the levels of the six indicators typically seen when countries go from being a middle-income country to a high-income country.
The results are sobering and reveal a long arc of development. As of 2023, 47 countries had reached the advanced development benchmark while 54 countries, if they continue at their current pace of development, are more than 100 years away from reaching it. These 54 countries fall into two main groups. The first group includes countries that are not necessarily the poorest but are experiencing reversals or stagnation. Countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Lebanon are in this category. They have made significant progress in the past but are no longer making progress on several fronts.
The second group faces a dual challenge of very low living standards combined with slow or nonexistent progress. This group includes many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as countries like Haiti and Yemen. For these nations, the road to advanced development looks incredibly long, stretching over a century unless their pace of progress fundamentally changes.
The gap between the world's top performers and its least developed countries is vast. A country like Finland is at least 150 years of typical development ahead of the five least developed countries. This means that at the typical historical pace it would take the least developed countries a century and a half just to reach where Finland is now.
Unfortunately, the pace of progress is at a 75-year low, which could make the long arc of development even longer. But the past is not a prophecy. We know that targeted interventions can dramatically accelerate progress. For example, World Bank projects like Mission 300, which aims to bring electricity to 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, can help countries leapfrog in infrastructure access. The journey is long, but with the right map and a focused effort, countries can accelerate their speed and shorten the road to a more prosperous future for all their citizens.
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