Are the least developed countries (LDCs) the same thing as developing countries?

Question

or are they 2 diff categories

Answer 1

No they are to separate entities.  LDC's emcompass:

    * low-income (three-year average GNI per capita of less than US $750, which must exceed $900 to leave the list)

    * human resource weakness (based on indicators of nutrition, health, education and adult literacy) and

    * economic vulnerability (based on instability of agricultural production, instability of exports of goods and services, economic importance of non-traditional activities, merchandise export concentration, and handicap of economic smallness, and the percentage of population displaced by natural disasters).  These countries a mostly located in Africa  

On the other hand developing countries that are rather new to a free market economy( i.e. Eastern Europe and Russia) or have become introduced industrializing recently (i.e. China, India,  and South America)

Answer 2

The definition given so far, seems to be alright. But I think it has to be made clear that the LDCs are part of the developing countries. They are just at the end of list and do have to make a lot of development work.