Media Type

Lecture

Publication Date

12-9-2014

Description

I would venture to broaden the scope of sustainable Development to include shared growth. After innumerable debates and discussions among the academic, practitioners and civil society Organizations, it has now been established that the concept of economic growth synonymous with increases in per capita income is too narrow and limiting. Various alternative conventional concepts such as Quality of Growth, Pattern of Growth, Growth with Redistribution, and Inclusive Growth have entered the vocabulary at several periods of time. One of the lessons we have learnt from the experience of the past few decades is that rapid economic growth has led to income inequality, regional disparity, gender differentials. All the boats have not risen on the strong tides of economic growth. We have therefore to design pathways that have broad based sharing of the benefits of economic growth so that a large segment of the population is the ultimate beneficiary. As I would show there has been some progress towards sustainable development in last three decades but very little has been done to tackle inequalities. Since 1987 after the Brutland Commission more formally known as Commission on sustainable development a lot of attention has been focused on raising awareness and tracing the consequences arising from liberalized consumption on natural capital and environment. It was argued that the replication of western living standards by the populations of emerging and developing countries would create a disaster as non-renewable natural resources such as minerals, metals, oil and gas are quickly depleted. In the meantime, the growing evidence gathered by the Intergovernmental panel on climate (IPCC) highlighted the issue of global warming and climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions from energy use have increase by about 3% per year in the 2000s around twice the pace in 1981 -2000.In the beginning, adversarial positions were taken by environmentalists and economists, by developed and developing countries, by the U.S. and Europe. But slowly and gradually these divisions are beginning to dissipate. Cost- benefit calculations have convinced the economists that the desirable course of action is mitigation and adaptation and Stern Review of 2006 provided the intellectual underpinnings of this change in the views held by mainstream economists. Policy makers have also begun to make some headway in tackling this problem seriously. In October, the EU announced plans to cut emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030

Notes

Special Lecture delivered at the Annual Conference of SDPI at Islamabad on December 9, 2014

Download

Share

COinS