The bottom of the list is dominated by tiny nations in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, and many countries in Africa. Although developing countries are at the bottom of the list, they are also seeing an increase in mobile phone usage. A recent study commissioned by Vodafone (PDF) indicates that mobile phone use in Africa is growing faster than anywhere else in the World, and that 97% of people surveyed in Tanzania said they could access a mobile phone, while just 28% could access a land line phone. Asian countries have the highest mobile phone penetration of developing nations, helped by their proximity to Japan and South Korea and the fact that many mobile factories are located there. The telecommunications companies prefer mobile technology because there is less infrastructure to install, so in many cases citizens can afford mobiles when they can't afford (or get) land lines. Vodafone has also indicated it intends to drop mobile phone call rates to compete with landline businesses in a number of countries.

Corruption affects a country in numerous ways. "Corruption in elections and in legislative bodies reduces accountability and representation in policymaking; corruption in the judiciary suspends the rule of law; and corruption in public administration results in the unequal provision of services (source). The World Bank argues that corruption "increases public investment while decreasing its quality and productivity", leaving the government less money to invest in infrastructure, health and education. Higher levels of corruption also dissuade companies from investing in a country, further hindering economic development.

In an October 1997 poll, 63 percent of people surveyed believed more was spent on foreign aid than on Medicare, while 27 percent though Medicare spending was greater. That year, Medicare funding was about 10 times as much as foreign aid.

Respondents to the 2000 PIPA poll also overestimated U.S. aid as a percentage of all foreign aid. The median estimate was that American aid accounted for 33 percent of all aid. The actual figure for 1999 was 16 percent.

Why was this coding system invented? Movies are not released at the same time worldwide. A movie may open in the United States months before it opens somewhere else. DVDs may already be out in America before the theatrical release in another country.

Without DVD coding, a person’s American friends could send them a DVD of a movie still playing in theaters in the recipient’s country, which would cut into box-office profits.

DVD coding also allows companies to set different prices in different regions, based on their purchasing power. If U.S. consumers could order DVDs from a poorer country where they sold for a couple of dollars, sales in the U.S., where DVDs can cost US$15 and up, would suffer.

In more industrialized societies, the agricultural industry tends to be more automated, with heavier reliance on machines and equipment than on human labor.

Also, in a poorer country, subsistence farming is a more legitimate alternative to low-wage labor than in a wealthier nation. Very few people in developed countries opt to pursue subsistence farming for economic reasons, though some do for cultural or social reasons.

Another factor in higher agricultural sector employment is the availability of cheap labor. Farm work is usually seasonal, with short periods of intense labor and long periods of waiting. It is easier and more economically sensible to find and use cheap, short-term labor in a poor country with low wages and high unemployment than in an industrialized nation with more plentiful employment alternatives.

The minimum wage in the United States is US$5.15 an hour, which means that a family of four with both parents working full-time minimum-wage jobs would earn US$21,424 per year (assuming 40 hours worked per week).

The U.S. poverty threshold is greater than the GDP per capita in many other countries, but this doesn’t mean it's better to be poor in America than average somewhere else. Prices for the same goods vary greatly from country to country. To get an idea of where one country’s poor stand in relation to another’s, comparisons would have to be made in purchasing power parity.

It would be a small family, an almost equal number of men and women, all of who would have had at least 9 years of schooling, most of who would be employed, enjoy good health and fairly happy.

Most of them would belong to an orthodox christian religious sect and attend church only rarely. But they're active sports lovers, known especially for their achievements in air games.

Most would speak Ukrainian or Russian, but some would speak Romanian, Polish or Hungarian. Most are avid cinema goers.

They eat mainly corn. oats and indigenous 'coarse' grains and grow most of their own vegetables.

For more, see: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/up/ and follow the links from there.

The indicators for creation of technology are patents granted per capita and royalty and license fees received from abroad per capita.

Diffusion of recent innovations is calculated from the number of Internet hosts per capita and the share of high- and medium-technology exports as a percentage of all exports.

Indicators for diffusion of old technology are telephones (land line and cellular) per capita and electricity consumption per capita.

Human skills are calculated based on the average number of years of schooling and the gross enrolment ratio at the tertiary level in science, mathematics and engineering.

The number of car thefts in the United States is more than three times as many as in the second-place country, the United Kingdom. But the U.S. population was estimated to be 290,342,554 people in July 2003, behind only China and India. The U.K.’s population was 60,094,648, or about 20 percent that of the U.S.

In car thefts per capita, the U.S. is ninth, with a rate of 3.95 per 1000. This is considerably lower than the U.K.’s rate of 5.63 per 1000.

As for why the number of car thefts in the U.S. is higher than in more populous India and China, it probably is because the number of motor vehicles per 1000 people in the U.S. is about 64 times as many as India and 76.5 times as many as China.

Size is an important indicator of a lot of other features of a country. Apart from allowing a greater population, it is also a factor in biodiversity. The 12 megadiverse countries (Australia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico, Peru and the US) combine the features of a large size and a temperate or tropical location. Only two countries - Madagascar and Ecuador - do not have a land area more than one million sq kms, and only Ecuador is not in the top 50 countries with the largest land area, although it does lie between Peru and Colombia. Although large, Russia and Canada lie too far north to house a large diversity of life.