benefits from modernization and whether such change is progress depends
upon how one weighs up its costs and benefits. There havebeen widespread
gains associated with economic growth including material standards of living,
consumption of food and clothing, and technological improvements (such as
supermarkets and washing machines) that have freed millions from burden-
some physical tasks (Goulet, 1992). There have alsobeen costs of growth.
Diseases of affluence (such as cancer, heart disease, and obesity) can kill just
as can diseases of poverty (cholera, diarrhoea and malnutrition). Traditional
cultures and their associated extended families and kinship groups have been
undermined. The ‘disease’ of manic consumption and resulting social stresses
in developed countries have been labelled by one writer as ‘affluenza’ (James,
2007). There are important questions about who makes these value judgements
about progress. Experts? Aid agencies? Domestic or developed country
governments? The poor themselves?
Economic growth and human development
GDP growth and improvements in human development are closely but not
perfectly related; there is no consensus about whether the relation is causal and
some countries have achieved much higher or lower levels of human develop-
ment than we would guess given their levels of average income.
There is generally a close fit between levels and growth rates of GDP and
human development. Measures of human development have also improved
more rapidly in developing countries than in developed countries during their
own history. For almost every potential quality of life variable there has been
convergence,including life expectancy, infant survival per 1,000 live births,
calorie intake, female literacy as a percentage of male literacy, political and
civil rights, telephones per capita, and the percentage of population with access
to clean water.
It is important to remember that a correlation between two variables (such
as GDP and a measure of human development) says nothing about causation.
It does not provide evidence that efforts to promote growth of either GDP or
human development will automatically see the other variable rise as a conse-
quence. Various studies have explored the nature of this link in more detail.
Dasgupta and Weale (1992) examined data for 48 countries going back to the
1970s; they found a close relation between national income and measures of
human development (including life expectancy at birth, the infant survival rate,
adult literacy rate, and political and civil liberties). Anand and Ravallion
(1993) returned to the question again found that average incomes in develop-
ing countries were correlated with the prevalence of absolute poverty, infant
mortality and under-five mortality (negatively) and with public spending on
social services (positively). Furthermore, they found that the positive relation-
ship between life expectancy and income vanished entirely once the level of
poverty and public health spending were accounted for. This implies that it is
40 Sources of Growth in the Modern World Economy since 1950