On Tue 6 Feb 2007, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> I call them "poor countries" -- as opposed to rich ones.
>
> Yeah, but there's Mexico (per capita income, PPP, $10,209; life
> expectancy, 75 years), and Bolivia ($2,856, 65), and Haiti ($1,846, 52).
> Next to Haiti, Mexico's rich.
True, which is why I prefer the finesse, "poorer countries," which underlines the comparative opposition to the rich countries, as well as the fuzzy set nature of the category. I agree with Julio that that opposition is the essence of the category.
BTW, speaking of the great difficulty of generalizing across the poorer countries (or across countries period for that matter), there is great set of animated graphics in the following presentation:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=4237353244338529080
The speaker gives the impression that you can download this software from free from the gapminder website, but I haven't looked into it. The animation starts a few minutes in. IMHO it quite repays the 15 minutes to watch it. I don't agree with all the inferences the speaker draws. But no matter how you cut it, the extent of variation over the last 30 years is very interesting. And if you love informatics, you'll love these graphs.
Michael