A New Typology for Global Development: Moving Beyond the Dichotomy of Rich and Poor Countries

In the first decades of the 21st century, the international community is struggling with three major global development challenges: poverty and inequality; conflict and state fragility; climate change and environmental degradation. These three challenges are closely interlinked; one cannot be tackled without the other. Individual countries' contributions to these three global development challenges vary widely, cutting across traditional dichotomies of rich and poor countries. Moreover, individual countries' capacities to address these challenges domestically and thus contribute to global development also vary widely, cutting across differentiations of developed and developing countries. This paper therefore proposes a new typology to classify individual countries’ contributions to global development and develops recommendations how the EU should adjust its cooperation strategies towards different types of country groupings.