Welcome to the Growth Blog

The Growth Blog is a forum for you - the policy maker, the academic, the student, and the interested citizen of the world - to agree, disagree, or simply to engage current practitioners on policies and issues critical to development. This platform was inspired by the series of meetings that the Commission on Growth and Development held around the world over the course of the last two years. Of the many lessons that emerged in the deliberations, the one that stands out is that inclusive growth requires inclusive thinking, and inclusive discussion.

 

Month of December, 2008

PQRS and the mechanics of growth

Submitted by Abhijit Banerjee on Tue, 12/23/2008 - 05:19.

The trouble with talking all the time in the language of countries growing and countries failing to grow, is that we forget the real actors:  People start a business, hire other people, make some people richer by buying from them, drive yet others out of business. This is what capitalism is all about. Growth is just the name we give to the accretion of all that.

 

What makes someone start a business? There is an influential view that says that being an entrepreneur comes naturally to people: Hernando De Soto tells us that if only the government would stop making it hard for them (by refusing to give them titles to the land they own, for example) the poor (which is most people in the developing world) could transform themselves and the rest of the economy through their entrepreneurship.

 

How could Africa become like America?

Submitted by Adrian Wood on Mon, 12/01/2008 - 10:09.

The current crisis is hurting all developing countries, but in a few years it will be past, and it will not have altered the big differences among countries on which the Growth Commission (GC) focused.  China will still be forging ahead, and Africa lagging behind.  Let us therefore do all we can to mitigate the shock, but not stop thinking about how to accelerate longer-run growth in Africa.