Sustainable Development and Economic Growth: An Interplay on an Evolving Globalized Stage
Thursday, June 1, 2000
Introduction
The goal of this paper is to present the reader with a brief background of the global experience with sustainable development in the past fifty years. Considering the broad range of issues involved with sustainable development, I decided to divide the paper into ten interconnected sections, each of which would be worthy of extensive analysis on its own.
I will begin by introducing the notion of sustainable development and introducing some of the questions that arise from with our ever-changing “new world order.” Following this will be a brief discussion of the first development experiences, which started as development assistance to help Europe recover following World War II. The success here provided confidence to expand assistance in other parts of the world. The third section covers the changes in the organization of society that provided the environment in which Western wealth and growth originated.
With this basic background of growth and development, I will then begin to present some of the more current issues concerning sustainable development. The fourth section addresses concerns that globalization will result in the extinction of individual cultures, with the world’s cultures ultimately being standardized. Section five is focused around knowledge inequalities and the technology gap between the developed countries and the developing ones. Multinational corporations are often accused of not contributing anything (in terms of such things as transferring management skills and technological knowledge) to the countries in which they operate. Section six briefly looks at these concerns. Inappropriate approaches towards growth also have severe consequences on the environment. A few of the environmental problems stemming from growth are the topics of section seven. Section eight raises questions about the measurement of the standard of living and discusses some recent ideas for improvement. This is followed by a short discussion of a fundamental question that should be asked when analyzing development experiments: does growth help the poor? With that question asked, I will end the paper with the convergence theory—that is, that the incomes of the late starters to growth converge quite rapidly with those of the leaders.