siphon off resources created by economic growth through taxation and use them
to provide free or subsidised developmentally nice things, such as free and
compulsory vaccinations or mid-day meals at schools. In reality the relation
between growth and development is more complex. First, people do not always
spend extra disposable incomes on ‘good’ things; instead of being used to
educate children and improve nutrition higher household income may be spent
on alcohol or fast food. If a poor person freely chooses to spend higher income
on foods high in saturated fats and develops health problems as a result, are they
in poverty or are they exercising a free choice? If our measure of development is,
say, nutrition we may judge development has not occurred, and if the measure is
freedom to choose we may be more optimistic. Maybe our conclusions change if
the decision was influenced by clever advertising or if an adult was choosing a
non-nutritious meal on behalf of a child? Other commentators, often from
outside the discipline of economics, are suspicious of ‘more things is better’
thinking. Current industrial-transport systems typical of developed countries are
energy- (particularly carbon-) intensive so economic growth increases the emis-
sions of greenhouse gases and contributes to global warming. In the longer term
growth will threaten the depletion of non-renewable natural resources such as oil
and gas and even renewable resources such as timber. These concerns lead some
to call for the goals of growth and totems of ‘faster’ and ‘more’ to be replaced by
‘sustainable’. Sustainable growth/development has been most influentially
defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present generation without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.
The two important concepts here are ‘needs’ – that the needs of the world’s
poor should have priority – and that sustainability should be considered in rela-
tion to ‘generations’ – that growth and development in this generation should
not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The
definition is broad enough to encompass purely environmental constraints on
sustainability and also the more narrowly economic: if the current generation
is piling up debt,future generations will be squeezed when they receive the
bill. On both counts the high-debt, carbon-intensive economic system prevail-
ing before 2008 would have been found wanting. There is of course an obvious
difficulty:in an uncertain world how can we know anything about the needs of
future generations?
An example of a debate about growth: the British Industrial
Revolution
Every aspect of the model of proximate and deeper determinants is subject to
a lively academic debate. We know a lot more about growth than ever before;
advances are being made all the time in data collection and data testing. Angus
Maddison spent a lifetime constructing estimates of the levels and growth of
GDP for much of the world economy running back hundreds of years. Nathan
Nunn undertook a detailed and painstaking exercise to estimate the numbers
Introduction 13