Developing country status
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Despite its overtaking Japan in second quarter economic output, the basic fact that China is still in the primary stage of socialism determines that the country will still be a developing nation for a long period in the future.
It is an indisputable fact that China ranks among the world's middle and low-income countries in terms of per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Based on gross national income per capita basis, the World Bank classifies countries into four categories: low income, lower middle income, upper middle income and high income economies, with the first three classified as developing nations.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China's per capita GDP in 2008 was $3,330. A World Bank report for the same year put the figure at $2,940 and ranked the country 130th in the world, labeling it a lower middle-income country.
That classification was confirmed by the 2009 data released by the International Monetary Fund, which said China's per capita GDP the previous year ranked it 105th in the world.
The large proportion of China's rural and impoverished population means the country has not yet extricated itself from a developing nation status. Of the country's 1.3 billion population, 700 million, or about 58 percent, still live in rural areas, seven percentage points higher than the world's average level of 51 percent.
According to the, "one dollar a person a day", poverty standard set by the United Nations, China still has 150 million people living below the poverty line, unevenly distributed in 512 poor counties. Even according to the low-income standard worked out by China in 2009 - which set an annual income of 1,067 yuan as the threshold dividing those who weren't living in poverty from those who were - the country still has about 43 million people living in poverty, a figure equivalent to the whole population of the People's Republic of Korea and five times Singapore's population.
Despite the enormous progress the country has achieved in alleviating poverty, China's impoverished population still remains the world's second largest, only India's is larger.
China's economic growth is still not securely founded, its productivity is comparatively low and the country's agricultural mechanization is still at a relatively low level, with only 71 tractors for every 100 square kilometers of arable land, one-third the world's average, 2003-05 data showed.
