Introduction - Prof. Sohini Sahu

Hello, this is a very quick introduction to introduction to economic growth. So, this is a course that is offered as a part of typically an elective that comes within macroeconomics. So, what we all plan to cover in this particular short course is, we would like to first ask ourselves a question that, you know, when we look around us, we find a lot of disparity across countries in terms of per capita income. Also, countries differ a lot in terms of their growth rates. Remember, India and China are perpetually compared with each other as to who is performing better in terms of economic growth. Economic growth matters because it is like a huge wave, you know, because if with a rising wave, it pulls up everything along with it. The standard of living also improves along with it. So, questions about economic growth, why do we see disparity in income across countries? Why do we see disparity in growth across countries? And what are the sources of growth? Because, you know, if we have an answer to those questions, then why is it that even in today's world, some countries are very poor, some countries have stagnated. This kind of amazes us to some extent. In pursuit of questions like this, this is an introduction to this particular area. And what we generally cover in a course like this, remember, it is an introductory course. As a course or as an area, economic growth is a huge area in itself. So, what we do in this introductory course is we motivate ourselves, especially with the help of data, we see a lot of graphs, we do a lot of cross country comparisons, and we try and see that how these differences are existing. In the next part, after looking at the data, we try to uncover some of the answers to the questions we just posed. And a major part of that is taken up by the solo growth model, one of the benchmark models that we need to understand when we do a course in economic growth. Apart from that, we also try and look at concepts like economic convergence. So, if one is asking the question that do poor countries eventually catch up with rich countries in terms of per capita income, in terms of economic growth, do we have an answer to questions like that? That is also something that we will be uncovering in this course. And since productivity growth plays a very important role, so methods like growth accounting and development accounting will also be discussed here. And finally, we will wrap up this course by talking about the emergence of what is known as new growth theories. So, we will talk about what are the new growth theories, and why the new growth theories came into being, and what is the direction of the current research that is being done in this field. With that intention, I hope to see you all for this course on introduction to economic growth. Thank you.