i kept on hearing in a few seminars about the global north and global south. while i had a decent idea i didn't dig deeper on this. but recently i came across the term brandt line and wanted to see how could a line separate the world into global north and south. is prosperity and quality of life so dependent on geography?

so krish and I set out to explore this further. first we plotted the per capital incomes of all the countries on a map as per a linear scale. the per capital income of the top county(Monaco) was so high that all other countries appeared red on the map. next we classified the countries into five classes to see how the contrast of countries would be around brandt line.

the final map gave a good idea of this contrast across the line. it also gave us some new insights like

1. Monaco has highest per capita GDP but seems like it has more to do with it being tax haven. to explore this further
2. why MENA is a term. because the middle east and northa african countries are prosperous compared to their other neighbours.
3. the three poor diagonal lines - north east to south west
   1. the red diagonal of countries that bifurcate africa
      1. Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan
   2. the orange diagonal in south america
      1. bolivia, paraguay
   3. the indian sub continent
4. exceptions - countries which are doing better than their neighbours
   1. urguay
   2. saudi arabia, oman and uae - oil?
   3. oman and yemen contrast
5. looks like geography still plays a very important role. along the lines of start contrast, we should split the per capita GDP at higher granularity and see if the transition smoothens. might be a good candidate for doing h3 analysis if the data is available at this granularity.

if you see anything interesting or you want us to explore something further do let us know in the comments. if you want to contribute to the exploration, let us know and we will add you to the repo.

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nkgokul_i-kept-on-hearing-in-a-few-seminars-about-activity-7186625812316450816-3S8M?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

TODO

1. video ideas
2. https://gitlab.neubitat.com/public-experiments/brandt-line#todo

global north and global South