These basics open up opportunities for new types of employment. They absorb such basics as the importance of strict adherence to quality standards when work is done by a large team. Many women get their first chance to be paid a wage for the work that they do. A growing number of workers can escape the hardship and risk of small-holder agriculture and switch to jobs in manufacturing, then in services. Access to new ideas lets them acquire more human capital.īecause opening up lets them acquire more human capital, a shrinking number of agricultural workers can supply all the food for everyone else. The more profound benefit from the diffusion of ideas is that people gain access to the chance to learn. But what we see when a country such as Bangladesh or China opens itself up to inflows of ideas is not simply that people have the chance to buy a phone that is much less expensive. Today, there are more than 6 billion, and the vast majority of people who got the new phones lived in a low or middle income country. In 1980, there were about 300 million phones on earth. There are many visible examples of the benefits that people receive from the diffusion of ideas. The question is what it must do to sustain this high rate of diffusion as the economy becomes more sophisticated. The experience in Bangladesh shows that it is possible to diffuse new ideas quickly enough to avoid even this temporary increase in inequality. During this second, catch-up phase, the diffusion of ideas increases growth as it equalizes income. Then as others gain access, they learn too. At first, only a few people have access to the chance to learn from new ideas. But this type inequality arises because the benefits that all can ultimately share diffuse slowly. When it does, this seems to confirm our fears about the grim tradeoff. When growth speeds up, income inequality can increase temporarily. I am also convinced that it is possible to sustain a pattern of growth via equality as it evolves into a middle income country, but only if the government takes on new responsibilities and makes the new types of investments required to give everyone the chance to learn. We know from the recent experience in Bangladesh that it is possible to have more growth and more equality. "You can make the pie bigger or divide it up more evenly, but you cannot do both."ĭespite its appeal, this intuition is wrong, and wrong not just about the details, wrong not just by a little. A simple saying, oft repeated because it sounds so plausible, frames this arithmetic as a grim choice between growth and equality. Democratic Republic of Congo - FrançaisĪrithmetic tells us that a nation can reduce its rate of poverty with more economic growth or a more equal distribution of income.
0 kommentar(er)
