Introduction
Two of the most critical contemporary global development concerns are poverty and globalization. Despite the vast possibilities of globalization to accelerate economic growth through increased international economic integration, its influence on reducing poverty levels has been inconsistent and even minimal in some countries. In many places in developing countries, both the occurrence and severity of poverty are unacceptable. Most of those current issues confronting the world community are associated with how the global economy, together with the political framework, is regarded in connection to emerging countries’ poor. Therefore, this paper explores some of the reasons why these nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are more likely to be poor and economically underdeveloped in 2021, while those in North America and Europe are more likely to be economically developed.
Main Body
Many of the poorest nations in the world are in Africa, which is mainly caused by their colonization by the European countries, where they were being subjected to widespread injustice when the Portuguese and Spanish empires grabbed African resources. The Portuguese were majorly concerned with the gold and enslaved people from Africa. Arabian merchants bought enslaved people throughout West Africa since the 8th century. This was until when the European settlers arrived, they remained in place as middlemen. Enslaved Portuguese people who were the Africans were utilized in the croplands. Millions of Africans were carried from African harbors to be enslaved people on the croplands in South and North America throughout the next two centuries (Boeck, 2022). Slavery throughout the new era was justifiable on a racial and economic basis. Despite such kind of oppression by the Europeans, they were not capable of fighting them back. Slavery had disastrous consequences throughout African countries. The Slave trade provided economic advantages for monarchs and communities to participate in anarchy and brutality. Across the many western African countries, depopulation and persistent fear of enslavement rendered agricultural and economic progress nearly impossible.
Some of the Asian countries were among the poorest in the previous year, which was majorly stimulated by the presence of political unrest. Civil problems and wars were widespread throughout most Asian countries, reducing the efficiency of anti-poverty initiatives. These were majorly caused by opposition to the performance and government policies. Activists throughout Pakistan, and Thailand, for example, were calling for the government’s impeachment and prime official’s resignation, and dramatic reforms to the monarchy together with its massive wealth and power. Protesters are taking direct aim at the monarchy and its tremendous wealth and power, unique in Thailand’s electoral history. The aggressive demands of the protestors, together with the ruling classes, stimulated this rebellion. They accuse the government of mismanagement of the economic resources and placing pressure on the government in the court, among other things.
Such countries within Latin America are currently poor and economically underdeveloped because of their poor governance. Irrespective of whether any government is liberal or maybe not, governance refers to its ability to set and enforce regulations and provide services. This is about representatives’ performance throughout implementing principals’ objectives, not the objectives that principals designate. Poor governance does have a detrimental impact on Latin Americans because of the integration of insufficient delivery of services, inappropriate legal regulation, and other factors. Throughout African countries, poor governance is the leading source of socio-economic crises. Poor and authoritarian government has become a catastrophe, and political persecution and tyrants’ monopolization of decision-making have worsened as the economy and social standards have deteriorated.
Most of the developed and wealthy countries in the world are within North American and the European nations due to their increased income towards the end of the colonial period. Quantitative analysis to establish income measures throughout the colonial era is scarce. Nonetheless, new research on income levels towards the close of the 19th century suggests that by that moment, free White citizens of North America seemed to have real wages that were comparable to those of Europe, which, as per Boeck’s projections, had the increased market share during that period. Boeck (2022) compiled a statistical model of unskilled salary and standards of living data for employees in three countries colonized by North America and a variety of other locales throughout the world.
They calculated relative well-being proportions for each site by transforming nominal salaries in each area towards their equivalents in grams of minerals like silver, then deflated them by sustenance expenses. Laborers from Philadelphia seemed to have the highest incomes of any region covered in their statistics by the era of the “American Revolution,” nearly 25% greater than laborers from England (Boeck, 2022). By the 18th century, laborers from Maryland, and Boston, which had trailed behind England, had caught up and were advancing well beyond their colleagues across China and South America. Boeck (2022) recently embarked on a much more difficult task of estimating national wealth by integrating social tables that describe the population’s vocational and class composition with every group’s labor and asset income projections. Their method enables them to calculate aggregated per capita basis estimations for the colonizing countries in 1775 and investigate income distribution within the colonies (Boeck, 2022). According to their calculations, per capita earnings for America were more extensive and more evenly distributed during that era than in England.
European countries were wealthy and developed worldwide as their colonial economy stimulated this. The colonial economies have been viewed from one of the two perspectives by professional economists. The first method emphasizes the increased ratios of land and the natural resources to labor experienced by European colonists throughout North American nations. As per this “demographic” model, natural resource availability increased worker productivity, particularly in agriculture, leading to colonists’ high standard of life and reducing the demographic restrictions that restricted population expansion in Europe (Boeck, 2022). Natural growth unconstrained by immigration, both willingly and coerced, has resulted in rapid economic growth. The other perspective concerning the colonial economies emphasizes the importance of the essential exports being the significant economic growth accelerators. According to the ” staple exports ” idea, the need for tobacco, wheat, and indigo, together with other exports by Europeans, is a primary influence on the composition and growth of their colonial economy.
Conclusion
As mentioned above, in 2021, historical analysts revealed that West African countries, Asian countries, and Latin American nations were poor and less developed. Some of the primary reasons which led to this included colonization by the Europeans in Africa, mainly the West African countries. This made the West African countries poor since the Europeans took most of their resources. In Asia, the historical factors that made it poor and less developed included the political unrest experienced in the Asian countries, which led to the socio-economic crisis, which automatically made the country poor. On the other hand, nations like the United States in North America and the United Kingdom in Europe were considered rich and highly developed. This was because of the increased income towards the end of the colonial period in North America, and European nations were considered rich and developed because of their colonial economy. Therefore, the success or failure of a particular nation across the world depends on some specific historical events.
References
Boeck, A. (2022). Africanisation of the European–Vulnerability, and De-colonization. Visual Cultures of Africa, 223.