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 January, 2009

The Elusive Quest for "Good Government"

Submitted by Raj Desai on Wed, 01/28/2009 - 10:38.

The Commission on Growth and Development’s Growth Report (GR) recognizes that a major problem confronting low- and middle-income countries is how to build effective governments where they do not exist.  This fundamental problem in comparative politics dates back at least to Aristotle’s categorization of city-states according to their performance in The Politics. 

Once upon a time, a commonly-held view was that many aspects of economic development—such as the spread of prosperity, mass consumption, and social mobility—and of political development (the emergence of good government) were parts of a shared process of “modernization.”