The Cultural Landscape · Chapter 1 as the diminishing in impor-tance and eventual disappearance of...
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288 The Cultural Landscape India, South Asia’s largest country, has become the world’s fourth-largest economy, behind the United States, China, and Japan, and the rate of growth of its economy is second only to China’s. India is the world’s leading producer of jute (used to make burlap and twine), peanuts, sugarcane, and tea and has mineral reserves, including uranium, bauxite (aluminum ore), coal, manganese, iron ore, and chromite (chromium ore). It is also one of the world’s leading rice and wheat producers (Figure 9-15, left). The country has become a major manufac- turer, though not as rapidly as China. In addition, India has become a major service provider. When you phone an airline, a help desk, or a credit card company, chances are your call will be answered by someone actually located in India. Sub-Saharan Africa: HDI 0.51 Africa has been divided into two regions: Countries north of the Sahara share economic and cultural characteristics with Southwest Asia; south of the desert is sub-Saharan Africa. Among the countries of this region, South Africa is a major source of minerals, including chromium, diamonds, man- ganese, and platinum. Other countries in the region also con- tain resources important for development, including bauxite in Guinea, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zam- bia, diamonds in Botswana and Congo, manganese in Gabon, petroleum in Nigeria, and uranium in Niger. Regional wealth is comparable to levels found in other LDCs. Despite these assets, sub-Saharan Africa offers the least favorable prospect for development (Figure 9-15, right). The region has the world’s highest percentage of people living in poverty and suffering from poor health and low education lev- els. And economic conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have dete- riorated in recent years: The average African consumes less today than three decades ago. Some of the region’s economic problems are a legacy of the colonial era. Mining companies and other businesses were established to supply European industries with needed raw materials rather than to promote overall economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa’s many landlocked states have difficulties shipping out raw materials through neighboring countries. And in recent years, African countries have suffered because world prices for their resources have fallen. Political problems have also plagued sub-Saharan Africa. European colonies were converted to states without regard for the distribution of ethnicities (see Figure 7-34). After independ- ence, leaders of many countries in the region pursued personal economic gain and local wars rather than policies to promote development of their national economies. These frequent inter- nal wars, as well as those between countries in sub-Saharan Africa, have retarded development. But the fundamental problem in many countries of sub- Saharan Africa is a dramatic imbalance between the number of inhabitants and the capacity of the land to feed the population. Nearly the entire region has either a tropical or a dry climate. Both climate regions can support some people, but not large concentrations. Yet, because sub-Saharan Africa has by far the world’s highest rate of natural increase, its land is more and more overworked, and agricultural output has declined. KEY ISSUE 3 Where Does Level of Development Vary by Gender? ■ Gender-Related Development Index ■ Gender Empowerment A country’s overall level of development masks inequali- ties in the status of men and women. Gender inequality FIGURE 9-15 Developing regions with low HDIs: South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. (left) Sugarcane is transported by rickshaw to a wholesale market in Hyderabad, India. (right) Family in Kenya hoe a field to plant tomatoes.
Transcript of The Cultural Landscape · Chapter 1 as the diminishing in impor-tance and eventual disappearance of...
288 The Cultural Landscape
India, South Asia’s largest country, has become the world’sfourth-largest economy, behind the United States, China, andJapan, and the rate of growth of its economy is second only toChina’s. India is the world’s leading producer of jute (used tomake burlap and twine), peanuts, sugarcane, and tea and hasmineral reserves, including uranium, bauxite (aluminum ore),coal, manganese, iron ore, and chromite (chromium ore). It isalso one of the world’s leading rice and wheat producers(Figure 9-15, left). The country has become a major manufac-turer, though not as rapidly as China. In addition, India hasbecome a major service provider. When you phone an airline, ahelp desk, or a credit card company, chances are your call willbe answered by someone actually located in India.
Sub-Saharan Africa: HDI 0.51Africa has been divided into two regions: Countries north ofthe Sahara share economic and cultural characteristics withSouthwest Asia; south of the desert is sub-Saharan Africa.
Among the countries of this region, South Africa is a majorsource of minerals, including chromium, diamonds, man-ganese, and platinum. Other countries in the region also con-tain resources important for development, including bauxite inGuinea, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zam-bia, diamonds in Botswana and Congo, manganese in Gabon,petroleum in Nigeria, and uranium in Niger. Regional wealth iscomparable to levels found in other LDCs.
Despite these assets, sub-Saharan Africa offers the leastfavorable prospect for development (Figure 9-15, right). Theregion has the world’s highest percentage of people living inpoverty and suffering from poor health and low education lev-els. And economic conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have dete-riorated in recent years: The average African consumes lesstoday than three decades ago. Some of the region’s economicproblems are a legacy of the colonial era. Mining companiesand other businesses were established to supply Europeanindustries with needed raw materials rather than to promote
overall economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa’smany landlocked states have difficulties shipping out rawmaterials through neighboring countries. And in recent years,African countries have suffered because world prices for theirresources have fallen.
Political problems have also plagued sub-Saharan Africa.European colonies were converted to states without regard forthe distribution of ethnicities (see Figure 7-34). After independ-ence, leaders of many countries in the region pursued personaleconomic gain and local wars rather than policies to promotedevelopment of their national economies. These frequent inter-nal wars, as well as those between countries in sub-SaharanAfrica, have retarded development.
But the fundamental problem in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa is a dramatic imbalance between the number ofinhabitants and the capacity of the land to feed the population.Nearly the entire region has either a tropical or a dry climate.Both climate regions can support some people, but not largeconcentrations. Yet, because sub-Saharan Africa has by far theworld’s highest rate of natural increase, its land is more andmore overworked, and agricultural output has declined.
KEY ISSUE 3
Where Does Level of Development Vary by Gender?
■ Gender-Related Development Index■ Gender Empowerment
A country’s overall level of development masks inequali-ties in the status of men and women. Gender inequality
FIGURE 9-15 Developing regions with low HDIs: South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. (left) Sugarcane istransported by rickshaw to a wholesale market in Hyderabad, India. (right) Family in Kenya hoe a field toplant tomatoes.
CONTEMPORARY GEOGRAPHIC TOOLSWal-Mart and China
No corporation exposes the effects ofglobalization on the world’s economymore effectively than Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was the world’s largestcorporation in 2008, with revenues of$379 billion. The company operated7,200 stores worldwide in 2008, includ-ing 4,200 in the United States, andemployed 2.1 million.
Geographic research has documentedthe key role played by geographic toolsin Wal-Mart’s growth. Most importanthas been application of the distance-decay concept, which was defined inChapter 1 as the diminishing in impor-tance and eventual disappearance of aphenomenon with increasing distancefrom its origin.
Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Wal-ton in 1962 with a single store in Ben-tonville, Arkansas. It was not until 1995that each of the 50 states had at leastone Wal-Mart. Maps of opening dates ofeach Wal-Mart store show a diffusionpattern (Figure 9-16). In the 1970s,Wal-Mart was a small company con-fined largely to Arkansas and Missouri.In the 1980s, it was concentrated in thesouth-central regions of the UnitedStates. In the 1990s, Wal-Mart reachedthe northeast, north-central, and westcoast regions. The diffusion patternresulted from a deliberate application ofdistance-decay principles. Rather thansprinkling stores around the country,the company preferred to saturate com-munities with stores before moving tonew territory. New stores were opened
near existing ones so that theycould share the same advertisingand central management controland, most importantly, the samedistribution center.
Distribution centers are verylarge facilities of more than 1 mil-lion square feet typically servingseveral dozen stores. State-of-the-art inventory controls move mer-chandise from the distributioncenter to the stores. To locate newstores, Wal-Mart mapped a one-daydriving distance around a distribu-tion center. New stores were placedfirst at the outer edge of the one-day ring around the distributioncenter; additional stores wereadded closer in until the marketarea was saturated. New distribu-tion centers were opened at ever-increasing distances from Arkansasuntil the company finally reachedCalifornia in 1990 and New Eng-land in 1991.
Wal-Mart’s U.S. retail stores arepart of a global network. Most ofWal-Mart’s merchandise is made inChina; moved by truck from facto-ries to Wal-Mart’s Global Procure-ment Center in Shenzhen, China;loaded on container ships for thetwo-week passage across the PacificOcean; unloaded in the port ofLong Beach, California; and trans-ported primarily by truck across theUnited States to the distributioncenters. ■
FIGURE 9-16 Growth of Wal-Mart stores. Wal-Martdiffused from Arkansas through the United States using adistance-decay model of store location.
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exists in every country of the world, according tothe United Nations. In some countries women haveachieved near equality with men, whereas in other coun-tries women lag far behind the level of developmentfor men. The United Nations has not found a singlecountry in the world where women are treated as wellas men.
To measure the extent of each country’s genderinequality, the United Nations has created two indexes. TheGender-Related Development Index (GDI) compares thelevel of women’s development with that of both sexes.The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) compares theability of women and men to participate in economic andpolitical decision making. ■
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Gender-RelatedDevelopment IndexThe GDI is constructed in a manner similar to the HDI, dis-cussed in the first two sections of this chapter (Figure 9-17).The GDI combines the same indicators of development used inthe HDI, adjusted to reflect differences in the accomplishmentsand conditions of men and women:
• Economic indicator of gender differences: Per capitafemale income as a percentage of per capita male income(Figure 9-18)
• Social indicators of gender differences: Number offemales enrolled in school compared to number of males(Figure 9-19) and percent of literate females compared topercent of literate males (Figure 9-20)
• Demographic indicator of gender differences: Lifeexpectancy of females compared to males (Figure 9-21)
The GDI penalizes a country for having a large disparitybetween the well-being of men and women. For example, Hun-gary and Saudi Arabia have approximately the same GDP percapita, but Hungary has a higher GDI than Saudi Arabia in partbecause the disparity between female and male income is lowerin Hungary than in Saudi Arabia.
A country with complete gender equality would have a GDIof 1.0. No country has achieved that level. A high GDI meansthat both men and women have achieved a high level of devel-opment, though women may have a slightly lower level than
men. A low GDI means that women have a low level of devel-opment and the level is substantially below that of men.
Gender EmpowermentThe GEM measures the ability of women to participate in theprocess of achieving improvements in their status, that is, toachieve economic and political power. In every country of theworld, both MDCs and LDCs, fewer women than men holdpositions of economic and political power, according to theUnited Nations GEM scoring system.
The GEM is calculated by combining two indicators of eco-nomic power and two indicators of political power (Figure 9-22):
• Economic indicators of empowerment: Per capitafemale income as a percentage of per capita male income(Figure 9-18) and percentage of professional and technicaljobs held by women (Figure 9-23)
• Political indicators of empowerment: Percentage ofadministrative jobs held by women (Figure 9-24) and per-centage of members of the national parliament who arewomen (Figure 9-25)
A country with complete equality of power between men andwomen would have a score of 1.0. As with the GDI, countrieswith the highest GEMs are MDCs, especially in North America,Northern Europe, and Oceania. The lowest scores are in Africaand Asia, though lack of data prevents calculating scores formany LDCs. Every country has a lower GEM than GDI. A higher
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FIGURE 9-17 Gender-Related Development Index (GDI). Similar to the Human Development Index(HDI), the GDI combines four measures of development, lowered by the amount of disparity between malesand females. A high GDI means that men and women have both achieved high levels of development, thoughwomen have a slightly lower level. A low GDI means that women have a low level of development and a levelsubstantially lower than that for men.
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FIGURE 9-18 Economic indicator of gender difference: Income. The average income of women is lowerthan that of men in every country of the world, both in MDCs and LDCs. Women on average have two-thirdsof the income of men in MDCs. This translates into an income gap of $12,000. In LDCs, the disparity betweenmale and female income is relatively low in dollar terms but high on a percentage basis. Earnings for womenlag far behind those of men in LDCs, although both figures are much lower than those found in MDCs.
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FIGURE 9-19 Social indicator of gender difference (one of two): school enrollment. Girls are more likelythan boys to be enrolled in school in MDCs, but less likely in LDCs. The percentage of females attendingschool is a key measure of gender disparity in sub-Saharan Africa and Southwest Asia. In Latin America andmuch of Asia, boys and girls are equally likely to attend school, but attendance is lower than in MDCs.
GDI compared to GEM means that women possess a greatershare of a country’s resources than they do power over allocationof those resources.
The indicators presented in the previous key issues reflectsharp differences in the levels of development of MDCs and
LDCs. To promote development, LDCs seek improvements inthese indicators. Progress has been mixed (Figure 9-26). On theone hand, key indicators look better for LDCs now than theydid a generation ago. On the other hand, the gap in key devel-opment indicators between LDCs and MDCs remains wide.
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FIGURE 9-20 Social indicator of gender difference (two of two): literacy. In MDCs, literacy is nearlyuniversal among both men and women. In Latin America and much of Asia, literacy is not universal, but ratesare similar for men and women. In sub-Saharan Africa and Southwest Asia, female literacy is low, andsubstantially lower than for males. Low female literacy is an especially important obstacle to development inthese regions. It is both a cause and a consequence of the relatively low contribution females are allowed tomake to the economy and culture of these regions.
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292 The Cultural Landscape
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FIGURE 9-21 Demographic indicator of gender difference: life expectancy. The gender gap in lifeexpectancy is greater in MDCs than in LDCs. In MDCs, a female baby born today is expected to live severalyears longer than a male baby, whereas in most LDCs, the gap in life expectancy between females and malesis only a year or two. The inability of women to outlive men in LDCs derives primarily from the hazards ofchildbearing. Women in LDCs bear more children than in MDCs, often under poor medical conditions.
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FIGURE 9-22 Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GEM combines twomeasures of the economic power of women and two measures of their politicalpower. Information was not available to calculate the GEM for most LDCs.Compare to Figure 9-17: A country with a much lower GEM than GDI offerswomen less power than economic resources.
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FIGURE 9-23 Economic indicator of empowerment: professionals. Thepercentage of women occupying professional and technical jobs is considered animportant measure of the economic power held by women in a country.Professional and technical jobs are regarded by the United Nations as thoseoffering women the greatest opportunities for advancement to positions ofinfluence in a country’s economy. Cultural barriers may restrict the ability ofwomen to obtain these jobs in the first place or to secure promotions to top-leveldecision-making positions.
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