Growth and Development: Economic and Legal Conditions

The evidentiary data detailing the economic state of low-income developing and least developed countries (‘LDCs) is both well known and relatively uncontroversial. On the whole, these nations can be characterised as having a low per capita gross domestic product (‘GDP’), unfortunate standards of living and extremely poor levels of health and services. Moreover, these nations have high levels of unemployment, large deficits and general economic instability. Many of these nations are also plagued by poor governance.1 The gap between the rich and poor is wide, with rich countries accounting for 55 per cent of world real income (at purchasing power parity) despite the fact that they contain less than one-sixth of the world’s population.2 By contrast, low income countries, with 41 per cent of the world’s population, account for only 11 per cent of world income.3 In total, the average real incomes of the rich countries are 14 times larger than that of poor countries.4 This disparity increases when individual countries are compared – for instance, the average income of the US is 75 times greater than the average income in Sierra Leone.5 In fact, every one of the 986 million people (almost 18 per cent of the total world population) living