Economic Development: Geography

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Introduction

As the economies of nations develop, different sectors of the economy rise to prevalence in different stages of development. Early economic development focuses on the agricultural sector with farming and animal husbandry as primary means of gaining income. As a nation begins to industrialize the industrial sector rises to prominence often causing a migration of people within the country from rural areas dominated by agriculture to urban areas dominated by industry. As industrial output begins to be outpaced by services (rather than the production of goods) we see a further transition in the economy as work shifts from the production of goods to the delivery of consumable services.

Today we will be exploring these transitions in the United States and across the world using several data sources gathered from the Internet.

The US Economy’s Changing Workforce

For this portion of the exercise you will be using the following visualizer.

For those without flash on your device some snapshots are available here

1)Examine jobs that fall into the following economic sectors.

2. Find visual connections for each sector to an overall trend in occupations (rise of industry and services, fall of agriculture, etc). Pay additional attention to the gender differences in these occupations.

3.For each of the above 3 sectors describe the following

What is the overall trend in this occupation?

  • Sector 1
  • Sector 2
  • Sector 3

Are there gender differences in this trend? Why do you think so…?

World Economies

For the following activities we will be using the gapminder website.

1. Load the gapminder visualizer

2. Click on the box on the y axis to change the quantity represented

look under economy->sectors->Agriculture % of GDP and select this quantity

3. Notice that the spheres that are higher on the y axis are now centered more on farming in their economy and the spheres that are farther to the right are countries with higher economic activity (GDP per capita)

4. You can get information about other sectors of the economy as well by changing the y axis to show Industry % of GDP and Services % of GDP

5. Using this tool find nations to place into 3 stages of development. Find 5 countries to classify into each stage

Name of country / Developing Countries / Transitioning Countries / Developed Countries
1
2
3
4
5

6. for each stage justify why you classified a nation into that category.

  • Developing
  • Transitioning
  • Developed

7. What about their economic output places them into that stage?

  • Developing
  • Transitioning
  • Developed

8. How does gapminder make this data visual? What symbols or tools make their illustrations so good?