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Economic Growth and Development

Decent Essays

ECONOMIC GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Introduction

Economies grow and develop, they expand and advance, and they progress and prosper. There are phases when they decline too, and there are economies that experience continuous decay. If one considers long stretches of human history, one knows that economies (civilizations) disappeared altogether. We will not take into account such long stretches of time. We shall not consider too distant a past either. We will leave them to historians, may be, economic historians.

Let us take a normal view. We shall then accept decline as an occasional, temporary phenomenon. We shall, therefore, use positive terms only. Of the positive terms, which have been used to describe changes as well as to prescribe …show more content…

The growth rate is often expressed in terms of per cent per annum. This is a positive change; there could be a negative change also.

Suppose, we look at a twenty-year period and use yearly figures for flow of output of goods, which is measured in terms of GDPFC at constant prices. The growth rates calculated on yearly basis would differ from year to year. Shall we use nineteen year-to-year figures of growth rate, some of which may be negative, to describe the change? Or, should we just compare the initial figure with the final figure? If we adopt the former, how to summarise the nineteen figures? If we adopt the latter, it is possible that one of these (initial or final) figures is just ‘abnormal’ as it does not fall in line. Would it not be a good idea to speak of general tendency and ignore abnormal fluctuations around the general tendency of increase? Economic growth should, therefore, be taken as a long-term tendency reflected by increase in flow of final goods and services produced by the economy.

If there is a general tendency of growth but there are occurrences of decline, the rates of growth will be negative in certain years. Shall we then say that, while the potential of economy to produce is continuously increasing, the potential is sometimes not realised? There could be various reasons for occasional decline. In economies that depend to a large extent on external trade

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