A Brief Note On Uneven Sub National Growth

All this is a little too close to what A. G. Hopkins called, in the Introduction to his brilliant Economic History of West Africa, the 'Myth of Merrie Africa'. This myth, and any static picture of the African past, does an injustice to the dynamic and innovative features in African society.

According to the shaded parts of the map, the United States, Canada, Australia and parts of Europe, and Japan make up the economic core. Core is the center of development. The economic growth is stemming from these powerful and dominant core countries. These countries are highly developed and they control most of the world's wealth. Semi-periphery countries serve as a buffer or go-between the core and periphery countries. These countries are developing stage of economic growth. They are able to help those countries that are on the periphery to receive resources from the core countries. These countries would include: Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, China, Mexico, South Africa, and Iraq. Periphery countries are not developed or poorly developed

Economic growth, put simply, is “an increase in the amount of goods and services produced per head of the population over a period of time”; development is inextricably linked with this economic growth. By utilising theories of economic growth and development we can see how the Chinese and Sub-Saharan African economies have emerged, but, more notably, we can use these to look at patterns from past and present to show their experience and the implications of this growth for the future.

Doreen Massey explains the process of how spatial structures create uneven development in her book Spatial Divisions of Labor. Massey holds that structures of dominance and subordination are determined by the way that production is organized over space. This occurs through a process that concentrates specific components of the production processes in certain regions; this explains why one region may only have blue collar manufacturing jobs while another is characterized by manual-labor, white collar jobs.

Okubo, T. (2011). Ricardian Comparative Advantage and Geographical Concentration. Review of Development Economics, 15(4), 620-637.

In How Asia Works- Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region, Joe Studwell explores the East Asian developmental successes of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China by challenging the prominent theory of developmental economics. He uses the same theory to examine the lagging behind of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Studwell evaluates the performance of these economies by a recipe he has concocted in which he explains as, “an historical review of east Asian economic development shows that the recipe for success has been as simple as one, two, three: household farming, export-oriented manufacturing, and closely controlled finance that supports these two sectors (Studwell 267).” The first stage requires land reforms

INTRODUCTIONBackground Sub-Saharan Africa continues to present the world with its most formidable developmentchallenge. During the last two decades the number of the poor in Africa has doubled from150 million to 300 million, more than 40 percent of the region’s population. About one thirdof the region’s population lives in countries affected by or emerging from conflict. Moreover,HIV/AIDS continues to threaten African lives and livelihoods. Africa is the only region thatremains behind on most of the MDGs. On current trends it will fall far short of meeting the2015 targets, (The World Bank, 2005).Africa has come a long way in its efforts to achieve sustainable development. Lessons of thecontinent’s development over the last two decades consistently highlighted the need for moreintensive efforts to effectively address some of its major development constraints. Acombination of ineffective policies, outright mismanagement (in some countries), heavyexternal debt burden, poor governance, and conflicts precipitated the massive economicdecline in the early 1980s. The recovery in the latter half of the decade was partly due tomajor economic policy reforms as well as growing socio-political pluralism and economicstability, which were consolidated in the decade of the 1990s. Yet, much still remains to bedone, as the African continent entered the 21st century faced with numerous developmentchallenges. Some of these challenges

Catch-up effect : Countries that start off poor tend to grow more rapidly than countries that start off rich

Modern African states have several problems ranging from corruption, to armed conflict, to stunted structural development. The effects of colonialism have been offered as a starting point for much of the analysis on African states, but the question of why African states are particularly dysfunctional needs to be examined, given the extent to which they have lagged behind other former European colonies in many aspects. In the first section, I will consider the problems with African states from the level of the state. That is, the nature of the states' inceptions and the underlying flaws may explain some of the issues that have been associated with African states today. Next I examine the development of, or lack of, civil

Taking into consideration the trickle-down theory of economics by Lewis, if the growth in economy is not sufficient to satisfy the needs and wants of the upper sections, nothing or very little shall trickle down to the lower sections in the hierarchy of society. Thus, the gap between the rich and poor widens and though economic growth has impacted a certain section of society, this cannot be considered development. Another example is an increase in the defence output of a nation, which accounts for an increased GDP but does not in any way contribute to economic development. Economic growth is not enough in itself to measure economic development as even if there has been a leap in the income of people in a particular nation,

Economists have been concerned about an important question for centuries: why are some countries rich while others poor. This is a question about economic growth. Take Korea for example. Korea had been divided into North and South Korea since 1948. These two countries share nearly the same geography, history and culture. However, the GDP per capita in the South Korea is only 3.22% of the South Korea. Another phenomenon is that the rapid growth had been observed in East Asian in recent years. This is another key economic issue: whether the growth rate of poor economics are higher than developed ones and which kind of factors lead to the convergence over time? (Barro and Sala-i-Martin, 1990). In most cases, the economic growth is defined as the amount of output (GDP or GDP per capita) that increases in an economy over time while the convergence refers to the poor economies coming up with the developed ones (Quah, 1996). As an important and popular issue in the field of economic research, it attracts many economists and there are many models to explain economic growth. In 1776, Adam Smith pointed out that the growth of a country is mainly due to labor, capital accumulation and technology progress. Ricardo comes up with the law of diminishing returns in 1817 and states that the diminishing marginal returns will be the reason to stop the economic growth of a country eventually. In the history of the development of economic growth

According to the report of the Commission on Growth and Development, persistent, determined focus on inclusive long-term growth by governments is one of the ingredients of a successful growth strategy. Yet, there is limited analytic work integrating the literature on growth and productive employment. 5 The term ‘shared growth’ can be misunderstood as implying a focus on income distribution schemes, which is why inclusive growth is preferred. 6 Source: Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries, OECD (2008).

Underdeveloped countries display common characteristics: low levels of GNI per capita, large income inequalities and low productivity levels across sectors. Consequently, there is a lack of investors and entrepreneur’s, thus cash flows cannot be directed into various sectors that influenced balanced economic growth. In many developing countries it is therefore common to see a developmental policy to maintain tension, disproportions and disequilibrium in which Hirschman argued the case of a deliberate unbalancing of the economy. These policies dictate the need for more-developed industries to provide undeveloped industries an incentive to grow. Of course, these policies are decided by those with more power, thus typically seen in urban areas of an economy, in which many can argue this leading to urban bias, which I will unfold in this essay.

The traditional view associated with geography and economic development across countries is that distance has played a huge role in creating disparities in terms of location . However, this interpretation is questioned by some who note that the failure of developing economies can be attributed to the persistent problem of institutional failure, which prevents individuals and the economy as a whole from growing. Although this warrants a possible claim, ultimately it should be noted that the failure and inadequacy of institutions in LDCs compared to MEDCs can still be traced to geography. Hence, I believe that twentieth century divergence in economic development across countries was largely the result of geographic factors.

He pointed out that different economic levels have their own requirements and they may not follow the same process of industrialization. Moreover, he raised the most influential theory related to late industrialization that the economically backward states may have rapider growth rate as they are late comers, and the national development process relied on the degree of economic backwardness. That is to say the more backward a country, the faster it will advance (ibid).