The Ends and the Means of Development

Global development as a universal objective to improve people’s social and economic wellbeing is a relatively recent concept. It was first embodied in the United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco 71 years ago this week, which stated: “the United Nations shall promote higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development.” In time, at least among practicing economists in academia and policymakers in government, “development” came to be seen as improved economic opportunity through the accumulation of capital and rising productivity. The implicit assumption here was that economic growth would lead to rising living standards, increases in life expectancy, reduced mortality, and a reduction in the incidence of poverty. And so, between 1950 and 2014, as world GDP per capita expanded at an annual average rate of 2.1 percent, this trend was associated with a remarkable evolution in three key indicators of...

Since the vast majority of the problems which humanity faces today are global in nature, the world needs more, not less international cooperation. Major planetary issues are being neglected—we are failing massively and risking being overwhelmed by a broad range of problems the solutions to which require effective “problem solving” mechanisms and institutions. The list of inherently global issues that are insoluble outside a framework of global collective action involving most nations of the world is long and includes: climate change, biodiversity loss, the depletion of tropical forests and fisheries, nuclear proliferation, widening income disparities, a flawed global financial architecture, illegal drugs, the rise of terrorism and the still high levels of poverty and deprivation afflicting much of the developing world, to name a few. Against this background, those who argue that the United Kingdom would be better off outside the EU do not seem to understand the extent to whic...

In his fine book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization , professor Thomas Homer-Dixon refers to the projected divergence in average income per capita between the rich and poor countries. Even if one assumes that the low income countries grow for the foreseeable future at much higher rates than the high income countries, because the current gap in per capita income is so large, the gap widens for many decades to come before convergence finally sets in well into the next century, if not later. In other words, by 2015 the rich countries are so far ahead of the rest of the world that, except for a handful of countries with incomes very close to the income of the poorest rich country, no one else has a realistic chance of converging, as Taiwan (China) and South Korea did during the post-World War II period. This phenomenon, of widening income gaps in the future notwithstanding the presence of higher growth rates in the poor c...

EEOC 35th Anniversary Art Contest Chelsea Lapp, Age 11 Sixth Grade Flying Hills Elementary School El Cajon, CA We have learned much over the past several decades about the connection between gender inequality and economic growth, particularly when we talk about inequalities in education and employment. Inequalities in education, for instance, artificially reduce the pool of talent which societies can draw from; by excluding qualified girls from the educational stream and promoting less qualified boys, the average amount of human capital in a country will be reduced and this will have an adverse impact on economic performance. We also know that the promotion of female education leads to lower births per women, not only because educated women will have greater knowledge about family planning but also because education creates greater opportunities for women that may be more attractive than childbearing. Lower fertility levels help reduce child mortality and ex...

The relationship between growth and income inequality is more complex than the one between growth and poverty, and has been the subject of considerable study. An early contribution in the 1950s by Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets, for instance, noted that at least two forces tended to increase inequality over time. One was the concentration of savings in the upper-income groups; he observed that in the United States the wealthiest 5 percent of the population accounted for close to two-thirds of total savings. A second factor, which has been a universal characteristic of development over the past century, was the gradual shift away from agriculture. Between 1991 and 2001, for instance, more than 8 million people left agriculture in India. Between 1965 and 2000 the share of the labor force employed in agriculture fell from 49 to 21 percent in Brazil, from 26 to 5 percent in Japan, from 55 to 11 percent in Korea, from 81 to 47 percent in China, and it fel...