Economic Growth And Economic Development

Economic development is defined as economic well-being of countries, regions and communities by improving the factors like health, education, working conditions, domestic and international policies and market conditions. It can also be defined as an effort to increase standards of living by growing real incomes and increasing the tax base. The concept of economic growth is different from economic development because economic growth focuses on increase of specific measure such as GDP (gross domestic income) or per capita income. While economic development covers the wide idea of improvement in literacy rate, life expectancy, health, education, infrastructure etc. GDP does not take into account the leisure, time, social justice, freedom and environmental quality. So, economic growth is not enough to measure the development of a country.
The Change in the concept of Economic growth
In 1950s and 1960s when many developing nations achieved their set targets of GDP but their standards of living did not changed, it made them realize that something was wrong with this narrow definition of development. Then many economists and policymakers planned more precise approach to consider poverty, increasingly unequal income distributions, raising unemployment. So in 1970s they came up with new definition, of economic development defined as the elimination of poverty, inequality and unemployment with growing economy. “Redistribution from growth” became common notion at that time. Dudley Seers raised the basic question when defining development when he said:
“The question to ask about a country’s development is therefore: what has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If al...

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...al products that has been stimulus to growing local demands leading to establishments of large scale manufacturing industries. These export earnings in 19th century have helped developing nations to borrow money in capital markets in lower interest rates. This capital gain in turn have caused further production, increasing import possibilities and specialized industry structures.
Basic scientific and technological development has played an important role in the modern economic growth of developed nations. Moreover the process of scientific and technological advance in all of its process has been limited to developed nations despite the growth of India and china as destinations for research and development activities of Multinational Corporation. In terms of research process low income countries have been more disadvantageous due to more amount of capital required.