#164 Two Perspectives

Yabi Lali

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India Policy Watch: The Indispensability of Economic Growth Insights on burning policy issues in India — Pranay Kotasthane Shruti Rajagopalan and Lant Pritchett's of India <a href="https://www.discoursemagazine.com/economics/2022/03/17/ideas-of-india-where-did-development-economics-go-wrong/">conversation</a> is full of insights for all public policy students. From that conversation, there was one particular claim that I want to discuss this week: economic growth is not just necessary, but also a sufficient condition for reasonably high levels of human wellbeing. Over the last few years, many people have grown sceptical about the very idea of economic growth. There is a whole cottage industry of experts and non-experts ready to diss economic growth in pursuit of other ‘worthier’ goals such as sustainability or inequality. This thinking is morally problematic given that economic growth is the only mechanism to reduce large-scale poverty in India. Anecdotally, it is tougher to convince Indians born after 1991 in economically well-off families—and connected to the global conversation on development—about the centrality of economic growth. Sometimes, the pushback against growth is not along the lines of "but, this is not the right way to achieve economic growth". Such pushback would've been desirable. Instead, some people firmly believe that India doesn't need economic growth anymore; it's had that enough. They argue that governments should now focus on redistribution to reduce inequality and directly tackle social progress indicators, moving beyond income progress indicators. Even though we keep highlighting how every percentage of growth brings roughly two million Indians out of poverty, this policy narrative seems to have become stale. Instead, the counter-argument often is: if Bhutan is focusing on ‘providing’ happiness, why shouldn't we? The confusion about the importance of economic growth is not j

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alice.wave

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