Ramesh Singh Test : Growth, Development And Happiness

• We can say that economic development is quantitative as well as qualitative progress in an economy.

• It means, when we use the term growth we mean quantitative progress and when we use the term development we mean quantitative as well as qualitative progress.

• If economic growth is suitably used for development, it comes back to accelerate the growth and ultimately greater and greater population brought under the arena of development.

• The report had a human development index (HDI) which was the first attempt to define and measure the level of development of economies.

• The dilemma of measuring the developmental level of economies was solved once the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published its first Human Development Report (HDR) in 1990.

• The ‘index’ was a product of a select team of leading scholars, development practitioners and members of the Human Development Report Office of the UNDP. The first such team which developed the HDI was led by Mahbub ul Haq and Inge Kaul.

• The thinking of becoming happier by becoming richer is challenged by the law of diminishing marginal utility of income")—after a certain point, the gains are very small.

• This means that poor people benefit far more than rich people from an added dollar of income. This is a good reason why tax-and-transfer systems among high-income OECD countries.

• The USA—the world's economic superpower—which has achieved striking economic and technological progress over the past half-century without gains in the self-reported happiness of the citizenry with the following serious concerns of today:

(a) uncertainties and anxieties are high,

(b) social and economic inequalities have widened considerably,

(c) social trust is in decline, and

(d) confidence in government is at an all-time low.

Perhaps for these reasons, life satisfaction in the USA has remained nearly constant during the decades of rising Gross National Product (GNP) per capita.