Examples Of Economic Growth And Poverty Essay

1047 Words3 Pages

Saquib Ali Shahid Ali Khan
M.A. I
Roll no. 1803

Economic Growth and Poverty

Economic Growth
Economic growth can be defined as an increase in the productive capacity of an economy over a period of time. This is generally measured by comparing GDP of a year with the previous year’s GDP of a country.
Poverty
Poverty is defined as a poor economic or financial condition of an individual or a group of individuals – generally a family – who are unable to meet their basic needs like food, clothing, shelter, and in modern times, it includes education.
This generally implies critically low income groups created by over-population, lack of employment opportunities, and further, the lack of government intervention in dealing with such issues.
Economic …show more content…

The government can achieve this if a significant amount of investment expenditure is on human development, i.e on education and health of the poor. Essentially, the only source of income for the poor is labour. Therefore, the government can play an important role here by increasing the productivity of labour through providing education, health care and technical skills.
Kerala is one of the best examples here – where a very high rate of literacy, of about 90 per cent, has proved extremely successful in reducing rural poverty. In contrast, Bihar is characterised by an abysmally low literacy rate and hence, has shown the weakest rate of poverty reduction.
Further, the impact of economic growth on poverty is also affected by the extent of inflation that accompanies growth. High inflation rate accompanying economic growth reduces the purchasing power of the people and therefore, has an adverse effect on poverty. Thus, a higher rate of inflation would mean more people below the poverty line.
Economic growth should be pro-poor or inclusive and the strategy of growth should be such that it generates employment opportunities for the poor in agricultural, industrial and service sectors at reasonable wages – which would help them to meet their basic and minimum …show more content…

The first approach is based on the assumption that the benefit of economic growth trickles down to the poor in the long run and thus, achievement of a higher rate of economic growth will result in reduction and removal of poverty. Therefore, through this approach, emphasis was laid exclusively on attaining higher economic growth to eradicate poverty.
Later, it was realised that economic growth is a very long term goal. Therefore, according to the second approach, in the short-run, special anti-poverty schemes were implemented by the government, until long term economic growth alleviates poverty significantly.
So far evidence indicates that both approaches towards poverty reduction have had only limited success because of a lot of leakages in the money spent on the projects, a large chunk of benefits being bagged by the middle men. According to 66th round of NSS survey, in 2009-10, 29.6 per cent or in absolute numbers 360 million people were living below the poverty line. Even this estimate was considered to be a gross underestimate of poverty in India.
The key economic reforms in the history of Indian Economy, i.e. Liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, have no doubt played an important role to help achieve higher economic growth. However, its impact on the poverty has been very little as it has benefited the rich

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