ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on social and economic challenges, discussing poverty, and exploring the relationship between development and inequality. It addresses causes of unsustainability, such as the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, and developments in the fields of manufacturing, and medical and agricultural technology. Relative poverty is defined in relation to the economic status of other members of the society: people are poor if they fall below prevailing standards of living in a given societal context. Various terms associated with economic development came about as means of measuring well-being, such as per capita income, gross domestic product, gross national product, unemployment rate, literacy rate, and many more. Economic development can be seen as a process in which the former colonial powers continue to apply existing and past international economic arrangements with their former colonies thus seeing multinational corporations as the modern-day agents of neo-colonialism.
