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The Politics of Economic Growth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

C. E. Black
C. E. Black
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The relationship between economics and politics is a complex one. Economics no doubt has important areas of theory where politics does not play a significant role, yet politics enters into the picture whenever the question is raised of mobilizing human and physical resources for economic ends. What is true of economic activity in general is particularly true of economic growth, where changes in attitudes and methods of work lend great importance to organizational problems. In discussing this question much depends, of course, on what one means by “politics.” The term may be used in a very narrow and partisan sense or, much more broadly, be applied to policy-making in regard to strategic choices among alternate courses of action. It is in this broader sense that politics is inherent in all economic action, and policy-making in this realm may be handled by a variety of agencies. When it comes to studying different systems of economic growth, policy decisions must be taken into consideration as much as rates and levels of achievement.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , July 1961 , pp. 622 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1961

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References

1 National Bureau of Economic Research, The Comparative Study of Economic Growth and Structure: Suggestions on Research Objectives and Organization, New York, 1959.Google Scholar

2 Hoselitz, Bert F., “Patterns of Economic Growth,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXI (November 1955), pp. 416–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in his Sociological Aspects of Economic Growth, Glencoe, Ill., 1960, pp. 85–114.

3 Treadgold, Donald W., The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War, Princeton, N.J., 1957, pp. 3–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provides an interesting discussion of this comparison.

4 A much fuller selection of comparative tables is now available in Ginsburg, Norton, ed., Atlas of Economic Development, Chicago, 1961.Google Scholar

5 Set forth in detail in Parsons, Talcott and Smelser, Neil J., Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social Theory, Glencoe, Ill., 1956.Google Scholar

6 An instructive example of such a comparative study is available in Malen-baum, Wilfred and Stolper, Wolfgang, “Political Ideology and Economic Progress: The Basic Question,” World Politics, XII, No. 3 (April 1960), pp. 413–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, Comparisons of the United States and Soviet Economies, 3 vols., Washington, D.C., 1959, 11, p. 380.Google Scholar