Industrialized/Developed/Developing Countries

There are a diversity of approaches for categorizing countries on the basis of their level of development, and for defining terms such as industrialized, developed, or developing. Several categorizations are used in this report. In the United Nations system, there is no established convention for the designation of developed and developing countries or areas. The United Nations Statistics Division specifies developed and developing regions based on common practice. In addition, specific countries are designated as least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, small island developing states, and transition economies. Many countries appear in more than one of these categories. The World Bank uses income as the main criterion for classifying countries as low, lower middle, upper middle, and high income. The UNDP aggregates indicators for life expectancy, educational attainment, and income into a single composite human development index (HDI) to classify countries as low, medium, high, or very high human development. See Box 1-2.