Brandt Line Assessment Final Essay

Words: 1099
Pages: 5

The "Brandt Line", created by Willy Brandt in the 1980s, is a visual representation of developing and developed countries in the north and south side of the world. Since the original Brandt line just represents the economy of a state, this essay’s objective will be to recreate a new Brandt line, with updated data, using other two different developing indicators.1

For this reason, the new self-made Brandt line will show the current situation of the northern and southern art of the world by using updated data. One of the indicators that I decided to use is the HDI (human development index), which provides a complex measure of three dimensions of human development: a healthy life and longevity which is measured by life expectancy, being

This is just an estimated value since, as we can see on the maps, there are some anomalies present in the trend.

Since both indicator lines nearly passed through the same country borders (with some little differences), drawing the line of best fit was not difficult. One of the challenges was finding an appropriate indicator that could separate LEDC countries from MEDC countries because my line of best fit, based on IMR and HDI, presented anomalies, like countries considered to be LEDC but still represented above the line (e.g. Northern Africa). These anomalies are mainly caused by the fact that some countries concentrate on developing particular aspects of society and not only on improving their income, therefore some countries will have more points when looking at certain indicators and score less points when looking at other values. This is because some countries concentrate on some concepts of development but not on other factors such as income. These variations between the different indicators can cause also different reproductions of the Brandt line. Another challenge that I faced was the difficulty of finding data because many countries did not have data, mainly because they went through natural disasters or civil wars (like Syria for example). To overcome these problems I went to research data that