ABSTRACT
Social development and elimination of poverty are hardly conceivable without sustained economic growth, although a once-for-ever change in asset distribution may bring about a lasting improvement in the entitlements of the hitherto dispossessed, even in a stationary economy. From the fact that sustainable economic growth is a necessary condition for a socially meaningful development process, it does not follow, however, that social development is subsumed in economic growth. Country after country has learned the hard way that the so-called trickle-down theory is fallacious; that growth can be immiserizing: that famines also happen in periods of boom when people's entitlement does not allow them to buy and/or produce the food necessary to keep them alive (Sen, 1986); that the anti-inflationary package recommended by the IMF leads to stagflation, with devasting social consequences in countries which cannot afford to stop growing, because of the demographic pressure of new entrants on the labour market and of the backlog of unemployment and underemployment.
