The largest 2nd group, which includes the vast majority of countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania. Overall, these countries account for 61% of the world’s territory and about 75% of the world’s population, but only 15.5% of manufacturing output. Young countries produce 15-16 times less industrial output per capita than developed countries.
In the modern era, the gap in the level of development of productive forces between economically highly developed and developing countries is widening due to the lag of developing countries in the field of research and development and the introduction of science and technology into production, and, consequently, in the growth of labor productivity.
Despite the differences between the countries of this group in terms of the level of socio-economic development, they have many common features:
1) multi-structure of the economy; along with the capitalist order, there are pre-capitalist modes and vestiges (for example, in Africa – tribalism), the role of market mechanisms and private entrepreneurship is extremely small;
2) scientific and technological dependence on highly developed countries;
3) export-import dependence of young states due to one-sided development of the economy, narrow specialization of the economy either in the production of a limited range of agricultural products, or in the extraction of one or more types of minerals;
4) the predominance of the agrarian and industrial sectors in the sectoral structure of the economy;
5) a fairly high share of the public sector and state intervention in the economy, which allows, to some extent, to compensate for the weakness of national private capital;
6) social inequality, much more pronounced than in economically highly developed countries. Low level of social protection.
The uneven development of the countries of this group is also one of the characteristic features. If the level of industrial development achieved so far is correlated with the population, the unevenness of these levels will be even sharper: the industrialization rate of Africa (0.11) and Asia (0.14) is almost five times lower than that of Latin America (0.58), although it is only slightly more than half of the world average (1.1).
At the same time, this group of countries includes such countries as the UAE, Kuwait, Brunei, Bermuda and the Bahamas, where the level and quality of life is not lower than in any developed country, and GDP per capita and the volume of social spending of the government corresponds to or even exceeds the similar indicators of the seven main capitalist countries.
In this group there are countries with a good level of economic development and social infrastructure. However, the majority of the population of these countries is below the poverty line, languishing in a miserable existence.
The diversity of the countries included in this group and the unevenness of their socio-economic development make it possible to distinguish a number of subgroups.