Introduction - Prof. Sohini Sahu

[Music] [Music] hello this is a very quick introduction two introduction to economic growth okay 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 the question that you know when we look around us we find a lot of disparity across countries in terms of per capita income okay 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 okay 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 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 CrossCountry comparisons and we try and see that how these differences are existing okay 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'll 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