Before we start comparing these two maps, we should clarify what the economic activity and

the Gross National Income are.

A country’s Gross National Income, or its GNI, is the sum of all goods and services it produces,
plus net income received from other countries.

It’s closely related to gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the monetary value of all goods
and services a country produces, but GNI adds the net income a country receives from
overseas. That income includes the net on compensation, property income, and taxes on
production and imports.

For most nations there is little difference between GDP and GNI, since the difference between
incomes received by the country versus payments made to the rest of the world is not
significant. For instance, GNI for the U.S. in 2011 was only about 1.5% higher than GDP.

Economic activity is what is carried out by humans in order to acquire goods (products and
services) that satisfy consumer needs.

If we compare map 38 with map 41, we can observe that:

 In contrast to developed countries, which have relatively few people working in the
agricultural sector and are large scale producers, carry out agricultural and livestock
activities for purposes of trade, other countries do these activities for self-
consumption. This happens for example in Africa, Asia and America. Subsequently, it
contributes very little to the Gross National Income and there is hardly any economic
and social development.
 Countries with a market economy or more than 50% of the workface working in the
service sector correspond to the ones that more GNI produce. The market economy is
based on a free market economy, law of supply and demand between consumers and
producers, private property, State intervention in a small scale, etc. It contrasts the
self-subsistence, typical of countries with low GNI.
 Countries with high GNI have developed tourism in their own territory as well as in
other places. Tourism not only contributes to its economic value, but also to the
number of people employed. It is an activity related to the level of development of a
country and the purchasing power of its inhabitants.
 Nowadays the tertiary sector has become a guide of how developed a country has
become, and these two maps prove that the bigger the percentage of people working
in the secondary and service sector, the bigger the GNI is.
The Human Development Index (HDI) was developed by the United Nations as a metric to
assess the social and economic development levels of countries. This index makes it possible to
follow changes in development levels over time and to compare the development levels of
different countries.

The GNI and the economic activity are related, as explained in Part 1. If we take into account
that the four principal areas of examination used to rank countries are: mean years of
schooling, expected years of schooling, life expectancy at birth and gross national income per
capita. We can verify that they are all related.

pais expectancia sectors Mean Expected GNI Index Ranked

years years
noruega 81,45 años Agricultura 12.6 17.5 64,992.3 0.994/1 1
2,7 %
Industria
38,3 %
Servicios
59 %
hondura 73, 5 agriculture: 5.5 11.1 3,937.7 0.606 131
s 39.2%,
industry:
20.9%,
services:
39.8%
Rusia 70.1 agricultura 7.3 14.7 22,352 0.798 50
2,2%,
industria
36,8%
comercio y
servicios
61%
1 indicates a high level of economic development, 0 a very low level.
Conclusion

The HDI give an overall index of economic development. It has some limitations and excludes
several factors that might have been included, but it does give a rough ability to make
comparisons on issues of economic welfare – much more than just using GDP statistics show.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 189 countries, working to foster
global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote
high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.

The IMF, also known as the Fund, was conceived at a UN conference in Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire, United States, in July 1944. The 44 countries at that conference sought to build a
framework for economic cooperation to avoid a repetition of the competitive devaluations
that had contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This extract from the New York Times, talks about a possible slower economic growth in the US
next year (2006) due to its raising foreign debt which is at the heart of dangerous global
influences. The fund said that the global economic growth had become to depend on a large
number of countries led by the United States, that consume far more that what they produce.
The IMF explains that these big budget deficits have been fueled by housing prices that are
ignoring the laws of gravity.

The organization also criticized the European Union, which is said to continue to grow at a slow
pace.

I agree with the statements of the text, countries can’t continue to be consuming more than
what they produce and need to find a way to short their deficits. However, I think that the IMF
should have advised before, and instead of criticizing, should be cooperating and giving
solutions to this problem