What is a “Developed” Country? Crash Course Geography

Today we’re going to discuss what it means for a place to be “developed”. Development is often associated with economic success — that is countries with higher standards of living and material wealth like those found in Europe and North America. But as we’ll see, this perspective is only one way to compare countries on the global stage, has strong ties to colonialist histories, and doesn’t necessarily capture a place’s environmental and socioeconomic sustainability or even the population’s general happiness. We’ll focus on the region in the Middle East and North Africa, called MENA, and examine how the histories of the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon have resulted in drastically different development scores.