Topic 1:

Global Divides
UNIT III
North America Europe Asia

Africa

South America

Ocenia

Antarctica
 Social Stratification
is essentially the phenomenon of segregating, grouping, and ranking
people based on differences in class, race, economic status, and other
categories.

Global Stratification
refers to this unequal distribution among nations
There are two dimensions to this stratification:
• gaps between nations and
• gaps within nations.
Classifying Global Stratification
It is helpful to classify nations into three or four
categories based on their degree of wealth or poverty,
their level of industrialization and economic
development, and related factors. Over the decades,
scholars and international organizations such as the
United Nations and the World Bank have used various
classification systems, or typologies.
Classifying Global Stratification
(First World, Second World, and Third World)
• First World was generally the Western capitalist democracies of North
America and of Europe and certain other nations (e.g., Australia, New
Zealand, and Japan).
• Second World was the communist nations belonging to the Soviet
Union
• Third World was all the remaining nations, almost all of them from
Central and South America, Africa, and Asia.
(First World, Second World, and Third World)

This classification was useful in distinguishing capitalist

and communist countries and in calling attention to the
many nations composing the Third World. However, it
was primarily a political classification rather than a
stratification classification.
Classifying Global Stratification

(Developed, Developing, and Undeveloped)

• this typology was initially popular, critics said that
calling nations “developed” made them sound
superior, while calling nations “undeveloped”
made them sound inferior.
Classifying Global Stratification
(wealthy (or high-income) nations, middle-income
nations, and poor (or low-income)nations)

This typology has the advantage of emphasizing the most

important variable in global stratification: how much wealth a
nation has.
GDP (GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT)
GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Net Exports

GDP = C + G + I + NX
C = consumption or all private consumer spending within a country’s
economy, including, durable goods (items with a lifespan greater than three
years), non-durable goods (food & clothing), and services.
G = total government expenditures, including salaries of government
employees, road construction/repair, public schools, and military
expenditure.
I = sum of a country’s investments spent on capital equipment, inventories,
and housing.
NX = net exports or a country’s total exports less total imports.
Typologies based on GDP per capita or similar economic measures are
very useful, but they also have a significant limitation.

Nations can rank similarly on GDP per capita (or another economic
measure) but still differ in other respects.
Global Poverty
Wealth and poverty are, of course, highly correlated: generally speaking,
the wealthier a nation, the lower its level of poverty.

this correlation is not perfect, and considering nations only in terms of

their wealth may obscure important differences in their levels of poverty
IMPORTANCE OF MEASURING
GLOBAL POVERTY
• First, political and economic officials will not recognize the problem of
poverty and try to do something about it unless they have reliable
poverty data to motivate them to do so and to guide their decisions.

• Second, valid measures of poverty reveal which regions of the world

are poorest and which people in a given nation are poorest in terms
of household characteristics (e.g., households headed by a single
woman), location (e.g., region of country or urban vs. rural), and
other factors.
IMPORTANCE OF MEASURING
GLOBAL POVERTY
• Third, valid measures of poverty enable officials and policymakers to
know how well efforts to help the poor are working, as a poverty
measure after some intervention can be compared to the poverty
measure before the intervention.
How, then, is global poverty measured?
Each year the World Bank publishes its World Development Report,

The World Bank puts the official global poverty line (which is
considered a measure of extreme poverty) at income under $1.25 per
person per day
Poverty Indexes
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Human Development Index (HDI)
is a composite measure of a nation’s income, health, and education
This index is based on a formula that combines a nation’s GDP per
capita as a measure of income; life expectancy at birth as a measure of
health; and the adult literacy rate and enrollment in primary,
secondary, and higher education as measures of education.
Poverty Indexes

Human Development Index (HDI)

Poverty Indexes
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Human Poverty Index (HPI)
similar to HDI
This measure reflects UNDP’s belief that poverty
means more than a lack of money and that measures
of poverty must include nonmonetary components of
social well-being.
HPI incorporates measures of the following indicators for
developing nations:
(a) the probability of not surviving to age 40,
(b) the percentage of adults who are illiterate,
(c) the percentage of people without access to clean water,
and
(d) the percentage of underweight children.

In UNDP’s 2009 Human Development Report, the five poorest

countries according to HPI were Afghanistan, Niger, Mali,
Chad, and Burkina Faso
Poverty Indexes
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)
HPI was replaced by MPI
The MPI incorporates a range of deprivation
measures applied to each nation’s households
that is fuller than that of the HPI.
Three categories of indicators of
deprivation
• Health
Child mortality (any child in the household has died)
Nutrition (anyone in the family is malnourished)
• Education
Schooling (no household member has completed 5 years of schooling)
Enrollment (any child in the family is not in school before grade 9)
• Standard of living
Electricity (the household does not have electricity)
Drinking water (the household does not have access to clean drinking water)
Sanitation (the household does not have adequate disposal of human waste)
Flooring (the floor is made out of dirt, sand, or manure [dung])
Cooking fuel (the household cooks with charcoal, dung, or wood)
Assets (the household does not own more than one of the following: bicycle, motorbike,
radio, telephone, or television)
A person is considered poor if he or she experiences deprivation in any
of the following combinations of indicators:
• any two health and/or education indicators, or
• all six standard of living indicators, or
• One health/education indicator plus three standard of living
indicators.

The five poorest nations according to the MPI are all African: Niger,
Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Burundi.
Although monetary and index measures of global
poverty yield somewhat different results, the
measures are still fairly highly correlated, and
they all indicate that the poorest regions of the
world are Africa and South Asia. These measures
have played an essential role in our
understanding of global poverty and in
international efforts to address it and its
consequences.
Global Inequality
refers to the gap between the richest and poorest segments of society

The most popular measure of economic inequality, and one used by the
World Bank, is the Gini coefficient.

Its calculation need not concern us, but it ranges from 0 to 1, where 0
means that income is the same for everyone (no economic inequality at
all, or perfect equality), and 1 means that one person has all the
income (perfect inequality). Thus the nearer the Gini coefficient is to 1,
the higher the degree of a nation’s economic inequality.
Gini coefficient
Theoretical Perspectives on Global
Stratification
Macro-sociological Theories of Global Stratification
Modernization Theory
According to modernization theory, low-income countries are
affected by their lack of industrialization and can improve their global
economic standing through:
• an adjustment of cultural values and attitudes toward work
• industrialization and other forms of economic growth
Data show that core nations tend to have lower
maternal and child mortality rates, longer life spans,
and less extreme poverty.
It is also true that in the poorest countries, millions of
people die from the lack of clean drinking water and
sanitation facilities, which are benefits most of us take
for granted.
Cultural equality, history, community, and local
traditions are all at risk as modernization pushes into
peripheral countries. The challenge, then, is to allow
the benefits of modernization while maintaining a
cultural sensitivity to what already exists.
Dependency Theory
• It focuses on ways that poor nations have been
wronged by rich nations.
• It states that global inequality is primarily caused
by core nations (or high-income nations)
exploiting semi-peripheral and peripheral
nations (or middle-income and low-income
nations), which creates a cycle of dependence
World Systems Approach
Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1979) world systems approach
uses an economic basis to understand global inequality.
Wallerstein conceived of the global economy as a
complex system that supports an economic hierarchy
that placed some nations in positions of power with
numerous resources and other nations in a state of
economic subordination. Those that were in a state of
subordination faced significant obstacles to
mobilization.
Core nations are dominant capitalist countries, highly
industrialized, technological, and urbanized.

Peripheral nations have very little industrialization; what they

do have often represents the outdated castoffs of core nations
or the factories and means of production owned by core
nations.

Semi-peripheral nations are in-between nations, not powerful

enough to dictate policy but nevertheless acting as a major
source for raw material and an expanding middle-class
marketplace for core nations, while also exploiting peripheral
nations
GLOBAL DIVIDE

Global Divide
is the imaginary line that separates the globally rich countries from
the poor ones.
History of the Divide
The idea of categorizing countries by their economic developmental
status began during the Cold War with the classifications of East and
West.

After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, which were
wartime allies, entered a Cold War – a state of political tension and
rivalry, from the mid-1940s to early 1990s. Several contemporary works
have reviews this event in the light of post-war events.
Western Bloc
comprised by the Eastern Bloc
industrial/capitalist US and led by the communist/socialist
the North Atlantic Alliance Russian Soviet Federative Socialist
(NATO), Republic.
• Albania,
• United Kingdom, • Poland,
• Canada, • Bulgaria,
• France, • Romania,
• Czechoslovakia,
• Italy • Hungary, and
• among others • Afghanistan
THE BRANDT LINE
THE BRANDT LINE
Brandt Line is a divisionary line which simply separates the rich
countries in the North from the poor countries in the South

developed as a way of showing the how the world was geographically

split into relatively richer and poorer nations. According to this model:
• Richer countries are almost all located in the Northern Hemisphere,
with the exception of Australia and New Zealand.
• Poorer countries are mostly located in tropical regions and in the
Southern Hemisphere.