• Support education projects in developing countries
• Trade under competitive terms
• Financial aid may be harmful in the long run

There is an ongoing debate in the economic literature about whether developing countries are catching up with the western world economically or not. The answer is that it depends on what region of the world we are observing, and there are several hypotheses as to why some developing countries do progress well economically while others have stagnated for many years.

The following graph showcases the relationship between the initial state of the country (x-axis) and its rate of economic progression (y-axis).

Although the figure above may be interpreted as there is no relationship between initial income and its future growth rate, the most likely answer is that there is an underlying convergence, but some countries are being held back by certain thresholds required to start prospering.

There are many reasons a country may be held back from progressing such as political mistakes, military conflicts, or lack of regional conditions, but those are difficult to change. What we can impact is how western countries interact with developing countries.

The Malthusian trap is a theory suggesting that a factor hindering developing countries from prospering is a positive relationship between income and birth rate. For developing countries, the relationship is often positive and strong. However, the relationship is either weak or negative in prosperous developed countries. If land is an important factor for production in the country, economical progression may be canceled out by an increased population to feed, meaning that there can be no long-term progression for countries where economical progression causes birth rates to increase a lot. This theory is quite conventional and in my opinion convincing in explaining the economic progression globally. 

One implication is to provide opportunities for developing countries to start education programs, since one way of escaping the Malthusian trap is to enable parents to invest in the children they choose to give birth to. Giving children opportunities to get educated also benefits the country economically in the future. Another implication is that financial aid to developing countries may cause them to be dependent on the support in the future. If the financial aid causes the population to increase, the developing country may actually be harmed by the good intentions from future poverty and starvation problems. In addition, globalism and free competitive trade across the world will help developing countries join the economic progression that prosperous countries of the world already have gone through.