Poverty is best defined with reference to the best definition available on obscenity: “I know it when I see it” was the cryptic definition of a US Supreme Court justice adjudicating in an obscenity case in the mid-seventies.There is a rich history of formal definitions of poverty, going back to the mid-nineteenth century. It is an attempt to capture the bottom-half of the population, the have-nots, the poor.
The study of inequality and poverty is politically correct, morally superior, at the cutting edge of power derived from policy prescriptions, and in a world dominated by the public sector (governments, and government organizations (GOs), quasi government organizations (QGOs) and non-government organizations (NGOs)) it is Big Business. Which is why there has been the largest amount of ideology in the study of the subject – at least since Karl Marx documented that ideology is king.
India has grown at an average rate of 5.7 % for the last 20 years. In per-capita terms, income growth has accelerated from the Hindu rate of less than 1 % prior to the eighties, to 3.7 % per annum since 1980-81. These National Account estimates have been provided by the Central Statistical Organization and are accepted as the approximate truth by all government bodies, domestic and international, non-government bodies and researchers and analysts around the world.
This paper investigates the relationship between freedom and economic growth. Two components of freedom are considered - political and economic. While political freedom measures have frequently been used, this paper offers three separate variables to measure a major, and much neglected, determinant of economic growth - namely, economic freedom. The relationship of freedom with respect to welfare is examined through the use of five separate indicators of welfare: - per capita income growth, measured in constant dollars and PPP dollars; total factor productivity growth; growth in secondary school enrollment and decline in infant mortality. Data for over 90 countries are used for the time-period 1973-1990.
It is indeed appropriate that a conference entitled “Economic Freedom and Development” is being held in this the 100th birth anniversary year of Friedrich Hayek. He was the originator of the idea that freedom, especially economic, was conducive to sustainable, and higher, economic growth. It is not an exaggeration to state that the developing countries would have been substantially ahead of where they are today if they had paid heed to Hayek’s fears about economic control (opposite of economic freedom) that were so eloquently expressed in The Road to Serfdom in 1944. Fifty-five years later, let us recognize our debt to Hayek. Not only did he see the future correctly, he also foresaw the sequence of consequences of attempts to control economic freedom
