Hi guys,
Can you please help me with the following:
Analyse TWo reasons for variations in living standares between developing economies and high income economies.
Explain how the growth of major developing economies has influenced global trade.
Cheers.
Note, these are just some points/ideas you may want to think about.
For the first question, you might want to think about the measures used to classify/distinguish low/high human development countries. The most obvious tool is probably GDP/capita.
Some reasons you may want to think of include
> factor endowments (eg China is endowed with cheap labour, Australia benefits from abundant mineral resources, etc);
> urbanisation rates (the proportion of the population inhabiting rural areas compared to cities, the rate at which people are flowing from rural areas to urban areas, etc);
> the levels of macroeconomic variables and quality of government (it has been found that people in developed countries get paid a lot more than those in developing nations for the same work, the ability of government to manipulate prices, mention inflation rates in lesser developed economies is a lot higher than those in developed countries); etc, etc ,etc.
For the second question make constant reference to the BRIC nations (brazil,russia,india,china). B&R for natural resources and I&C for cheap labour. Mention that some of the developing nations are not so accomodative when it comes to foreign investment (eg China --> tight capital controls, etc). Refer to the increase in aggregate demand, due to large populations. More people = more mouths to feed --> higher energy prices (energy companies do well).
Hope this helps,
Cheers