External publications

Beyond rich and poor: identifying global development constellations

Hackenesch, Christine / Svea Koch / Sebastian Ziaja
External Publications (2022)

in: Development Policy Review 40 (6), article e12628

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/dpr.12628
Open access

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent example that global development problems can occur anywhere, rebutting the assumption of a world divided into developed and developing countries. Recent scholarship has coined the term “global development” to capture this changing geography of development problems. The article contributes to these debates by proposing a novel empirical approach to localize global development problems in country contexts worldwide. The approach rests on a universal understanding of “development.” We identify countries that are particularly relevant for global problem-solving and consider not only the problem dimension but also countries’ capacities to address these problems.Findings: Our results show that countries with the most severe combinations of problems are as diverse as Afghanistan, Nigeria and the United States. Two thirds of countries with above-average contributions to global problems are