Question

Using the concepts of incentives and good institutions, explain how a country might achieve economic growth.

Answer 1

Economic growth is measured by an increase in gross domestic product (GDP), which is defined as the combined value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. Many forces contribute to economic growth. However, there is no single factor that consistently spurs the perfect or ideal amount of growth needed for an economy. Unfortunately, recessions are a fact of life and can be caused by exogenous factors such as geopolitical and geo-financial events.Politicians, world leaders, and economists have widely debated the ideal growth rate and how to achieve it. It's important to study how an economy grows, meaning what or who are the participants that make an economy move forward.In the United States, economic growth is driven oftentimes by consumer spending and business investment. If consumers are buying homes, for example, home builders, contractors, and construction workers will experience economic growth. Businesses also drive the economy when they hire workers, raise wages, and invest in growing their business. A company that buys a new manufacturing plant or invests in new technologies creates jobs, spending, which leads to growth in the economy.
Other factors help promote consumer and business spending and prosperity. Banks, for example, lend money to companies and consumers. As businesses have access to credit, they might finance a new production facility, buy a new fleet of trucks, or start a new product line or service. The spending and business investments, in turn, have positive effects on the companies involved. However, the growth also extends to those doing business with the companies, including in the above example, the bank employees and the truck manufacturer.Growth is usually calculated in real terms - i.e., inflation-adjusted terms – to eliminate the distorting effect of inflation on the prices of goods produced. Measurement of economic growth uses national income accounting. Since economic growth is measured as the annual percent change of gross domestic product (GDP), it has all the advantages and drawbacks of that measure. The economic growth-rates of countries are commonly compared using the ratio of the GDP to population (per-capita income).The "rate of economic growth" refers to the geometric annual rate of growth in GDP between the first and the last year over a period of time. This growth rate represents the trend in the average level of GDP over the period, and ignores any fluctuations in the GDP around this trend. Economists refer to an increase in economic growth caused by more efficient use of inputs (increased productivity of labor, of physical capital, of energy or of materials) as intensive growth. In contrast, GDP growth caused only by increases in the amount of inputs available for use (increased population, for example, or new territory) counts as extensive growth. Gross Domestic Product – measures the total production of an economy as the monetary value of all goods and services produced during a specific period, mostly one year. Dividing GDP by the size of the population gives us GDP per capita to measure the prosperity of the average person in a country. Because all expenditures in an economy are someone else’s income we can think of GDP per capita as the average income of people in that economy. Here at Core-Econ you find a more detailed definition.The economic growth of a country is the increase in the market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time.We define economic growth in an economy by an outward shift in its Production Possibility Curve (PPC). Economic growth is measured by the increase in a country’s total output or real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Gross National Product (GNP).
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country is the total value of all final goods and services produced within a country over a period of time. Therefore an increase in GDP is the increase in a country’s production.
Growth doesn’t occur in isolation. Events in one country and region can have a significant effect on growth prospects in another. For example, if there’s a ban on outsourcing work in the United States, this could have a massive impact on India’s GDP, which has a robust IT sector dependent on outsourcing.