Tag Archives: Growth

By Edvin Arnby Machata

The international development community has for almost two decades focused on improving governance as a strategic priority for aiding economic growth. This article points to the historical record and argues that 1) growth does not require good governance, 2) good governance and representative institutions are products of economic development – not the other way around, and that 3) the configuration of national institutions determine whether a political order will produce developmental outcomes or not.

‘Good governance’ has been a mainstay component in most donor-funded development programmes during the last two decades. What exactly constitutes good governance is empirically problematic, but while implementations vary, demands for good governance generally include provisions to minimize graft and increase respect for human rights.

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“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Edward Abbey

During most of the history of mankind, average incomes across the globe amounted to somewhere between $1 and $2 per day and income growth was only marginally above zero, averaging about 0.033 percent per year from year 0 to year 1868 (and probably even less during the preceding millennia). In the hundred year period from 1868 to 1968, however, real per capita income growth suddenly increased forty-fold to about 1.43 percent per year, and when I was born average per capita income in the world had reached about $10 a day. During my life-time, income growth has averaged 1.96 percent, implying that average per capita GDP in the world is now above $20/day. Growth rates have kept increasing steadily, reaching an average of about 2.94 percent per year in the first decade of this century. Such growth rates are unprecedented in the history of our species (1).

The big question is: Will growth continue at these high, and perhaps even accelerating, rates? Or is the growth spurt experienced over the last 150 years just an anomaly, which is about to come to an end?

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“When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money,” Native American saying

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” Brundtland Report

It is undeniable that our current way of life is unsustainable; If every country consumed resources and created waste at the same per person rate as the United States, we would need three to five planets to survive. Part of the problem lies in the fact that economics—the major discipline advising global and national policy—has failed to include the environment in its calculations. To rectify this problem, different methods have been proposed, so as to make predictions and come up with better ways of managing the planet’s resources without compromising the future.

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