The world used to be divided into the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’. During the past decade the concept of the developing world has been successfully challenged: the countries that used to be so described have now been disaggregated. Countries such as China and India have diverged quite fundamentally from those like Chad and Afghanistan. Viewed from the perspective of the latter group of countries, that was, indeed, a core message of my book The Bottom Billion. The likes of China and India have duly been reconceptualised as ‘emerging markets’. In this column I will argue that the same process of disaggregation ... (full story)