Development and Growth Revisited

The nature of economic development and economic growth has generated wide discussion over the years, especially since World War II (Flammang, 1979). In the past decade in particular, social scientists seem to this observer to have moved closer to a consensus on what the terms ‘development’ and ‘growth’ mean. It is quite common now for development economists to distinguish between the two, to accept the proposition that development is the broader term and that it includes growth, and to observe something like ‘development is more qualitative and growth is more quantitative in nature.’ Increasingly, too, scholars have been reticent to specify that the end product of development must necessarily be desirable (Rasmussen, 1990). But perhaps it is also true to say that quite often the terms still go undefined and that both theory and policy are shortchanged by this (Malizia, 1990). Recently it has occurred to me that perhaps development and growth are aspects of adaptation-economic adaptation within niches or regions and between niches or regions. The term “niches” of course refers to economic niches-niches formed by geography (regions) as well as niches formed by resource definitions, products, technology choices, demand patterns and the like. Niche filling, which to me is primarily the growth process, can indeed be thought of as something dealing with small changes over a series of fairly short runs. Niche changing, or economic development, is another matter, however. If, as this writer argued in 1979, the essence of economic development is structural change, then students of development must have some conception of two distinct subprocesses: the disintegration of at least part of one niche and the formation of at least part of another. That is, the first niche or structure must ‘soften,’ i.e. become somewhat ‘processual,’ before it begins to ‘harden’ and become more structured.