book

Elements of Economic Growth

21 Pages 2376 Words 1557 Views

1. How can an economy growt? This is a question highly remarked nowadays by politicians and economy scholars. Stepping away from classical approaches, most of the bibliography studied coincide on two ways: quantity on the production line or by quality on it, making individuals more productive. Approaching the second way, there are some basic factors needed to driving growth in individual productivity, which is what makes the human capital: health and education. And other factors that make the human efforts more reliable: a state of law, good governance, good political situation and finance control. Talking about education, it makes possible the investigation in the technology research field and allows the individuals more adaptable to the world technology advancement. But even here quantity of years of schooling, along with the quality of the teaching process are very important for measuring the economic growth. PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is an international study that evaluate education systems across the world by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in certain countries in reading, maths and scientific literacy. Quantity of schooling must be saw as a good but not perfect indicator for quality of education. For reference, most of the top scoring countries on PISA are in Asia. State of Law and a good political situation, are others factors with such importance to discuss, but they can be controversial. The opportunity for entrepreneurs to create and for civil society to have freedom of speech, makes a sine-qua-non path for the success of democratic systems that lead to economic growth and improvement. Besides that, it provides less chances to corruption and oligarchies with high concentration of wealth. On the other hands, there are countries that don't practice the traditional western representative democracy, I´m talking of China, Vietnam, and Russia, with a good state of law. In other regions as Latin America and Africa, even the multiparty system, there are high levels of corruption. Those economies with bad governance, civil wars and low education will remain stuck in this low-income trap. This has been the position a number of African nations have found themselves in for so long. As economies improve and technology become more sophisticated, the economic growth measures will be each time less and less amazing, because they will have difficulties to increase the economic level reached. The initial years of development would be enough with taking essential and proven steps as opening themselves up and adapt to the world’s existing technologies. When those initial steps are completed, countries will need to have self-creativeness and start to apply policies according national resources and strategies with technology available with the national potential. That is when some economies get stuck at the same point and are unable to advance taking some changes in economic strategies. In the case of countries like China and India, there is an important remark to make. Despite the high levels of economic growth, with numbers that can lead them to the highest spots on the global list of world economies, they are needed of basic infrastructure in most of their territory. Keeping the visible economic growth in the most important cities, but with a countryside with the highest levels of poverty and underdevelopment. We have seen some factors about why is so important the quality of the working population, now let´s analyze the quantity of workers as another important factor for economic growth. In this field, there are two effects. The first and most obvious, as more people you have in the factories, is easier to produce more goods and services when you have more employees or people on the production line. And as more working population a state have, there are more people paying taxes. 2. The Rise of BRICS and the Role of G-7 The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) could surpass the G-7 countries in 2017 with the Purchase Power Parity (PPP). That could happened keeping in mind the G-7 countries have been slower than BRICS to recover from the economic crisis of 2010, while the developing countries have been insulated from the crisis with an astonishing speed. That breach between the BRICS and G-7 countries is projected to continue. The BRICS countries could be more or less 75% larger than the G-7 countries by the end of 2050 in PPP terms. The growth paths of the BRICS and the G-7 in Market Exchange Rates (MER) terms, looks similar but the developing countries will overtake the developed

Read Full Essay