Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
These include:
The role of appropriate technology
Banking, credit and micro-finance
The empowerment of women
Income distribution
Infrastructure
Education and health - human capital plays a very important role in economic
growth:
there is a general view around the world that education and health are
fundamental human rights
education and health are merit goods with positive externalities
Elementary education and universal literacy contributes towards a countrys
economic growth
There is therefore strong arguments in favour of governments intervening to
provide education and health care services
Banking services and credit are very important to economic growth and
development in the following ways:
they provide an incentive for people to save because they offer a return
(interest) on their savings
they provide businesses and farmers with credit to open, run and expand
their businesses/farms
they provide consumers with credit that can be used for investments in
human capital (education and training)
access to credit can help to alleviate poverty as it is the only way poor
people can get themselves out of the poverty trap
These are small loans to people who do not ordinarily have access to credit.
Micro-credit schemes may become a substitute for urgently needed
government anti-poverty policies
Micro-credit schemes contribute to the growth of the informal sector
Some extremely poor and highly unskilled people may be harmed by microcredit because they dont have the necessary skills to establish businesses
Interest rates in micro-credit schemes can be very high
Empowerment of women
Many countries have serious gender inequalities between men and women
(girls and boys) in terms of control of resources and access to opportunities these are the result of discrimination against girls and women. Some of the
consequences of this are:
women and girls face higher mortality (death) rates than men and boys
girls do not get the same opportunities to access education and health as
boys do
lower levels of education and skills mean many women cannot access jobs
requiring skills
inequalities in inheritance rights means that property usually passes on to
men
women face restrictions in accessing credit as they do not have any
collateral (property) to use for loans
womens incomes are on average substantially lower than mens, due to
lower levels of education and skills and discrimination against women in the
workplace
Positive externalities of empowering women include: