The UN HDI is measures a country's level of human development. While there is a strong connection between a high HDI score and a prosperous economy, it is not always the case. The top 47 countries by HDI have scores ranging from 0.793 in Barbados to 0.955 in Norway. Many countries having an HDI of 0.788 and over (as of 2010), are also listed by IMF or CIA as "advanced" (as of 2009). The country of Bhutan started the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH), to measure how happy people actually are. They felt the GNH was as important as GDP, and this idea has spread beyond Bhutan. References - ↑ Developed Economy Definition. Investopedia (2010-04-16). Retrieved on 2013-07-12. - ↑ Sachs, Jeffrey (2005). The End of Poverty. New York, New York: The Penguin Press. ISBN 1-59420-045-9. - ↑ IMF GDP data (September 2011) - ↑ "Gross domestic product, current prices & Gross domestic product based on purchasing-power-parity (PPP) valuation of country GDP". World Economic Outlook Database, April 2012. International Monetary Fund. April 2012. Retrieved 2016-10-26. - ↑ "Group of 7 Countries". NationMaster. Retrieved 26 October 2016. - ↑ "G7, G8, G20". European Commission. A developed country, or advanced country, is a country that has a high quality of life, developed economy, and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less industrialized nations. Most commonly, the criteria for evaluating the degree of economic development are: gross domestic product (GDP), gross national income (GNI), per capita income, level of industrialization, amount of widespread infrastructure and general standard of living. Which criteria are to be used and which countries can be classified as being developed are subjects of debate. Different definitions of developed countries are provided by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), the World Bank, the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Paris Club and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), while the Human Development Index is used to rank countries on the composite basis of life expectancy, education, and income per capita. Developed countries have generally more advanced post-industrial economies, meaning the tertiary sector provides more wealth than the secondary sector. They are contrasted with developing countries, which are in the process of industrialisation or are pre-industrial and almost entirely agrarian, some of which might fall into the category of least developed countries. As of 2023, advanced economies constitute 57.3% of global GDP based on nominal value and 41.1% of global GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP) according to the IMF. The designations "developed" and "developing" are intended for statistical convenience and do not necessarily express a judgement about the stage reached by a particular country or area in the development process. Nevertheless, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) considers that this categorization can continue to be applied: Terms linked to the concept developed country include "advanced country", "industrialized country", "more developed country" (MDC), "more economically developed country" (MEDC), "Global North country", "first world country", and "post-industrial country". The term industrialized country may be somewhat ambiguous, as industrialisation is an ongoing process that is hard to define. The first industrialized country was the United Kingdom, followed by Belgium. Later it spread further to Germany, United States, France and other Western European countries. According to some economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, however, the current divide between the developed and developing world is largely a phenomenon of the 20th century. Mathis Wackernagel calls the binary labeling of countries as "neither descriptive nor explanatory. It is merely a thoughtless and destructive endorsement of GDP fetish. In reality, there are not two types of countries, but over 200 countries, all faced with the same laws of nature, yet each with unique features." A 2021 analysis proposes the term emerged to describe markets, economies, or countries that have graduated from emerging market status, but have not yet reached the level equivalent to developed countries. Multinational corporations from these emerging markets present unique patterns of overseas expansion and knowledge acquisition from foreign countries.