Geo Assignment

GEO 3001 Project Guidelines Spring 2014

Economic Growth

1. How an economy can growth?

This is a question highly remarked nowadays by politicians and economy scholars. Stepping away from classical approaches, most of the bibliography studied coincide on two ways: quantity on the production line or by quality on it, making individuals more productive.

Approaching the second way, there are some basic factors needed to driving growth in individual productivity, which is what makes the human capital: health and education. And other factors that make the human efforts more reliable: a state of law, good governance, good political situation and finance control.

Talking about education, it makes possible the investigation in the technology research field and allows the individuals more adaptable to the world technology advancement. But even here quantity of years of schooling, along with the quality of the teaching process are very important for measuring the economic growth. PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is an international study that evaluate education systems across the world by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in certain countries in reading, maths and scientific literacy. Quantity of schooling must be saw as a good but not perfect indicator for quality of education. For reference, most of the top scoring countries on PISA are in Asia.

State of Law and a good political situation, are others factors with such importance to discuss, but they can be controversial. The opportunity for entrepreneurs to create and for civil society to have freedom of speech, makes a sine-qua-non path for the success of democratic systems that lead to economic growth and improvement. Besides that, it provides less chances to corruption and oligarchies with high concentration of wealth.

On the other hands, there are countries that don´t practice the traditional western representative democracy, I´m talking of China, Vietnam,...