World Bank to eliminate the term “developing country” from its data vocabulary

The World Bank in its 2016 edition of its World Development Indicators has decided It’s no longer distinguishing between “developed” countries and “developing” ones in the presentation of its data.

The International Monetary Fund says its own distinction between advanced and emerging market economies “is not based on strict criteria, economic or otherwise.”

“The main issue is that there is just so much heterogeneity between Malawi and Malaysia for both to be classified in the same group—Malaysia is more like the US than Malawi,” says Umar Serajuddin, a senior economist in the World Bank’s statistics office. “When we lump disparate countries together in the same group, it isn’t really useful.”

“This is about updating people’s mental models as well,” says Tariq Khokhar, a data scientist at the World Bank. “If the regular person’s mental model of the developing country is a big family [and] bad health outcomes, that might be a shorthand. [But] in a lot of countries, you have far improved infant mortality numbers. The old way of thinking of the developing world as this place where there’s been no progress is not that helpful.”

That’s not to say that income classification is a waste of time. It just needs to be specific in order to be meaningful.

The move reflects the changing stakes of development as the world shifts from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), created by the UN in 1990 as a road map for fighting global poverty, to the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), set last year by the global community.