 You are clear for launch. And with that, shut down your visors, O2 on, and prepare for ignition to O2. You can copy that and um... Hey, it's me, Mr. Ruschoff. Alright, so in our last lesson, we were looking at populations, we're looking at population pyramids. In this lesson, we're going to look at how the United Nations uses that and other demographics to classify countries based upon their development through what is known as the Human Development Index, or HDI. So let's talk about rich and poor countries for a moment. There are certainly advantages of being in a rich country and disadvantages of being in a poor country. I want you to just take a moment and think about what those advantages and disadvantages might be. Think about if you're in a rich country such as the United States, what services would you have available to you, and what would your quality of life be like? Then compare that with living in a poor country, and how would that be like? What would you not be able to easily have in a poor country, and what problems would you have? Now, as you think about your answers, you could probably group all of your answers into three broad dimensions, long and healthy life, knowledge, and standard of living. And this is exactly what the United Nations does. Now, the United Nations is an international organization made up of 194 countries that was formed right after World War II, and it was an effort to be able to prevent conflict. Essentially, the UN is the place where countries can come and talk it out. Now, working under the belief that if you assist poor countries become more developed, this would reduce the potential of future conflict, the UN does a lot of work with these poor countries. Now, to identify which countries need the most assistance, the UN developed this Human Development Index, or HDI. The HDI combines a variety of statistics and demographics within these three dimensions to come up with a score that goes from zero to one, with one being the absolutely most perfectly developed country you can have. And no, there isn't a perfect one. Norway is actually the highest, with a 0.953, and the United States ranks 13th of the world at 924. Now, compare that with the country with the lowest HDI score is the African country of Niger, which just has a 354. Now, let's go over these three dimensions that make up HDI. Now, the first of these indicators is long and healthy life, and the key demographic that the UN looks at is life expectancy. This is the average period that a person in that country is expected to live. Overall, life expectancy to the world is about 72 years old, but this varies greatly from country to country. For example, in Japan, the expected life expectancy is about 84 and a half. However, we also find that in every country, women will live longer than men. So a Japanese woman can expect to live on average to be about 87 and a half years old, but her male counterpart will just live just over 81 years old. Now, at the other end of the spectrum is an African country known as the Central African Republic. The average person here lives just to be less than 53 years old. Now, again, women live longer at 55 years, and men live just over 50 and a half years. Now, the United States, by the way, has a life expectancy of just under 80 years. Now, to assess the reasons for a country's life expectancy, the UN also looks at other demographics, such as adult infant mortality rates, the rate of infants without immunization, the incidence of HIV, and other diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Now, as you would suspect, the longer the life expectancy, generally the higher the development the country might have. Now, the second indicator that is used by the UN to determine its HDI is knowledge, and there's actually two demographics that are looked at to be able to come up with this index. The first is the number of years of schooling that a child getting ready to enter school is expected to be able to receive their lifetime. And under the world, the average is just under 13 years. The United States averages almost 17 years, but the highest in the world is Australia, which is just shy of 23 years. This is from being in elementary school from six years to being about 28 years old in college. Now, way at the bottom of the scale is the African country of Niger, where students generally begin elementary school at the age of seven, but they will only usually have about five years of schooling. This is actually a 17-year difference between Niger and Australia. Now, the second demographic that is used in order to determine the index for knowledge is the average number of years of schooling that adults in the country actually have. Now, this number is almost always going to be lower than what is expected. The world average is just about eight and a half years, and the United States actually is tied for being the second highest country at 13.4 years, traveling Germany, who has an average of just over 14 years. So, if the United States and Germany has to the top of the scale, at the bottom end of the scale, we have the African country of Burkina Faso, where the average adult only has about one and a half years of schooling. Now, this should be easy to recognize that the more developed the country is, the more educated its people will be. Now, among the other factors that the UN tracks to account for education of a country are its literary rates. Now, this is the percentage of the citizens that actually can read and write. Now, the UN also looks at other things such as what is the percentage of schools that have internet access, the percentage of elementary school teachers who actually train to be teachers, and then also the ratio between how many teachers there are to elementary school children. In addition to all this, the UN will also compare achievement scores in math, reading, and science. The last dimension that makes up the HDI is a decent standard of living. To store this dimension, the United Nations looks at something known as the gross national income per capita. Now, the gross national income is one of three ways that the amount of money a country earns can be calculated. The other two are gross national product and gross domestic product. Now, this is going to be a bit confusing. So, let me break it down for you and we'll let's look at GDP and GMP first. Now, the important letter to look at is the middle letter, D for GDP or N for GMP. D is for domestic, which means, well, quite frankly, being at home. So, GDP counts all the money that is made by the sale and purchase of products within the borders of a country. In other words, a country is home. Now, the N in GMP stands for national. Here, the GMP counts all the money earned from the sale and purchase of products by all the citizens or its companies, even if it's outside the borders of the country. For example, let's look at McDonald's, which is an American company, but it has restaurants in other countries. In fact, of the over $21 billion earned in 2019, only about $8 billion was actually sold within the United States. And if we're talking about GMP, remember, this is counting all the nation's businesses. So, all $21 billion of McDonald's revenues will count towards the American GMP. However, if we're looking at GDP or the gross domestic product, only those sales actually made in the United States, in this case, about $8 billion, is counted towards the American GDP. In other words, the Big Mac sold in Germany counts as part of the American GMP, but not Germany's GMP because McDonald's is an American company. But if we're figuring GDP, that same Big Mac does not count as part of the American GDP, but it does count as part of the German GDP because the Big Mac was actually sold in Germany. So, that's the difference between GDP and GMP. What's GNI then? Well, GNI is the same as GDP, plus any remittances or any foreign aid that's given to that country. Remittances send Mac money to their family in their home country. This money that's sent back to their family in their home country is counted as that country's GNI. Additionally, some international organizations, such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, among others, will actually provide foreign aid and business money to be able to help poor countries be able to develop. These monies that a country receives as foreign aid is also counted into their GNI or gross national income. Now, in countries such as the United States does not receive foreign aid and whose remittances are very low, there really isn't going to be much of a difference between the GNI and the GDP. However, countries such as East Timor will have a GNI as much as four times as a GDP due to the amount of foreign aid it receives every year. Now, the UN takes this gross national income and divides this number by the number of people in the country. This gives you what is known as GNI per capita, where the amount of income of the country for each person who lives there. And is this GNI per capita that is used to determine the standard living dimension of a country's HDI. Now, together with the other two dimensions, which is long, healthy life and knowledge, the UN calculates the HDI for each country. Now, once each country has an HDI score, remember, this is between zero and one, the UN will separate these countries into four categories. Those categories are very high human development, high human development, medium human development, and low human development. However, many times, you're going to simply hear countries described as developed, developing, and newly industrialized. Developed countries are essentially rich countries, developing countries are poor countries, and newly industrialized countries are those countries that are transitioning from being developed countries to being developed countries, but they're not quite at the developed country level yet. Now, if you compare this to the UN's HDI, this roughly breaks down as the very high human development countries are the developed countries, your low human development countries are your developing countries, and your high and medium development countries are roughly your newly industrialized countries. Now, remember from our last lesson, we can largely identify a country as developing or developed by the population pyramid. Developed countries will have a distinctive triangle or Christmas tree population pyramid, and developed countries will either have that cup or that box style population pyramid. But in the population pyramid of a newly industrialized country, we actually see where the country has begun to modernize. The top portion of these countries will look exactly like that Christmas tree population pyramid. However, if we look at the younger age groups, we'll see how the country's birth rate has begun to decrease as it's beginning to develop from a poor, undeveloped country to a more developed country. So that is the United Nations Human Development Index. This index is just one of the many ways that we can look at a country to describe what it's like there. In our next lesson, we're going to look at the different economic systems of the world, but until then, keep on learning.