The idea of a split between developed and developing is a fifty year old idea, says Hans Rosling:
(Don’t miss the little development race he runs about 15 minutes in)
If you haven’t come across him before, Rosling is on a mission to make statistics interesting. Gapminder is his company, and there are some amazing tools on the site. The company was bought by Google a couple of years ago and I’ve been waiting to see what they’d do, and in November they started making stats searchable in some very useful ways.
The Earthbound Report 