This paper aims first of all to explore the social sustainability and the quality of economic growth in a sample of 50 Emerging and Transition Economies (ETEs), which are countries experiencing a process of fast growth and institutional change in most cases. Through a series of cross-country regressions, using OLS models, the paper assesses the type of development in those countries. Economic growth during 1995-2006 is regressed against poverty, inequality and human development variables. The main findings are that growth did not reduce poverty and that income inequality, measured as a reduction of Gini coefficient between the years 1993-2004, worsened too. From one side, economic growth in ETEs occurred despite the worsening of income inequality. However, this result does not identify a “U-shaped” Kuznets curve because even after a consistent period of economic growth, inequality did not decrease and it remained at higher levels. Only countries with higher education levels and public expenditure in strategic dimensions seem to escape from this trap. On the other side, economic growth occurred at the expense of an important human development variable i.e., life expectancy, and at the expense an important indicator of political democracy, i.e., Voice and Accountability.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche in its series Working Papers Series with number
wp2008_01.
Find related papers by JEL classification: O10 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General O15 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty P52 - Economic Systems - - Comparative Economic Systems - - - Comparative Studies of Particular Economies
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: