More than a decade ago, I wrote a discussion about why Thailand was a third world country according to economic data even if Bangkok was itself a considerably advanced city. All over the world, it is common for people who live in large cities (especially but not only capital cities) to have standards of living which would be considered first or second world while people in villages and small provincial towns have a much poorer standard of living that drags down the status of a country as a whole. For better or worse, the status of a country in terms of what world it belongs to depends on how the people live in the middle. If enough of your people share in the prosperity that belongs to cities that are well connected with the world, the country as a whole is giving a high status even if some people within the country live in poorer or less developed areas, but if only a small privileged minority get to enjoy the good life, the country as a whole is viewed as being worse off than its better part.

Laos is not a fourth world country, though, even if its official GDP would indicate so. If one reads the official economic data, Laos is in terrible straights, with a GDP hovering around $2,000 per person thanks to high debt levels, a terrible currency (the kip) which is practically worthless, a labor shortage and so on. This GNP puts Laos at 151st in the world, just above Haiti and just below Kenya, and a few places below Mauritania and Zimbabwe. This is ridiculous. Kenya has millions of people who live in literal garbage dumps trying to earn a meager living. Mauritania still has slavery–and slaves (as we should know) tend not to have a high per capita GDP. Haiti is a hopeless mess of a nation in an advanced state of societal collapse into anarchy. Laos is by no means a wealthy country, but it is not that poor off.

Admittedly, I was only in Laos a short time, but in that short time I saw that the people of Laos were enterprising, there was tourism at a good standard, even in a provincial town like Vieng Vang (where I stayed). There were people who understood enough English for me to communicate with as taxi drivers and hotel owners and managers and the like. There was development going on–a major road was in terrible condition between the Lao-China Expressway (itself a good road, not something I say lightly), but one could see that there was work going on to make things better and that is something worth celebrating or appreciating at least. There were beautiful mountains and tourist places set up for backpackers to enjoy. The country is well worth exploring at some length, and if Vientiane is a fairly typical large city, it is a large city that is growing and growth and progress mean a nation that is not in a hopelessly poor state.

The mystery deepens when we look at Laos’ real GNI, which is about $8,000 a year. With a real income that is so far above its nominal income, one gets the sense that Laos is not really as poor a country as would otherwise seem to be the case. A GNI of $8,000 a year would put Laos about halfway between Myanmar and Vietnam, and this seems right from an intuitive level from the conditions that one sees in the country. Laos has some major issues, but those issues appear to be on the official level. Still, given the standard of living that one sees, Laos is definitely a third world nation, albeit one that is trying to grow and develop while preserving its natural beauty and avoiding the pitfalls that other nations have faced in destroying their country (think Haiti, for example). If Laos’ government is by no means a strength, I did see an airport employee contemptuously toss aside an attempt by a Chinese tourists to bribe him in the immigration line, and that sort of integrity on the personal level shows that something is going right as far as the nation goes. Not all nations have things going right for them.