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The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development, The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and The World Bank, Commission on Growth and Development, Pp. xiii +103, www.worldbank.org.
"The Elusive Quest for Growdi" was the title of a book written in 2002 by William Easterly, a former World Bank economist. The same title perhaps remains appropriate for "The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development", published by the World Bank in 2008, on behalf of the Commission on Growth and Development.
The publication in 1955 of the Theory of Economic Growth by Arthur Lewis became a classic in what later emerged as the discipline of Development Economics. This pioneering work was regarded as belonging to the same genre as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Of course, growdi is central to achieving a number of development objectives including poverty reduction. In the subsequent 55 years or so, we have built up a mountain of literature on growdi and development contributed by academicians and official agencies like the World Bank and some U.N. agencies. One wonders whether we are any wiser today in terms of offering a workable blueprint of growdi and development to a developing country, than what we were in the mid-1950s. But one thing is clear. As Peter de Haan puts it: "The study of development economics provides the student with aestiietic pleasure. For instance, the neo-classical growtii model and the subsequent improvements do indeed arouse aesthetic entiiusiasm ...." (Development in Hindsight, Peter de Haan, KIT Publishers, Amsterdam, 2006, page 10). Haan doubts whether increasing sophistication of growth models and the emergence of a new breed of development workers linked to aid disbursement has contributed substantially "to the promotion of growth and eradication of poverty in poor countries".
No doubt these tomes of research and Reports including the present Growdi Report, have facilitated a better understanding of the process of development. But this understanding has, alas, not led us to effectively tackle the problem of poverty. Erudition is no substitute for practical policy. In the final analysis, poverty and hunger are an affront to civilised society. How does one explain then, the alarming increase in hunger world wide? FAO estimates that the number of under-nourished at 923 million in 2007...