inclusive growth

An economy for the many, not the few: the focus for inclusive growth?

In recent months, there has been a global recognition that we must make growth more ‘inclusive’. In the UK, this has culminated in the RSA announcing an inclusive growth commission.

This is welcome. There is no doubt that in recent years we have neglected what we have known for decades – namely that economic growth does not guarantee poverty reduction and that inequality hampers growth. Indeed, high levels of welfare and low levels of spending power is a shaky basis to a local economy. An inclusive local economy needs the poor to not be poor.

A social turn to the local economic growth agenda?

ur local economic approach is working for the few, not the many. A dominant ‘growth at all costs’ agenda is not delivering socially or even working particularly well for local growth. Backed by the treasury, the agenda has worked for some areas, but, overall, growth is anaemic: low wages, insecure work, and inequality. However, there is change afoot. Inclusive growth appears to be slipping onto the mainstream agenda.

Inclusive growth: The next oxymoron?

From time to time a new phrase is coined. Sometimes the new phrase articulates a new solution, at other times it reinvigorates an old one, or – more cynically – masks it. In economic development we now have the phrase ‘inclusive growth’. Does inclusive growth represent a step change or is it just a new oxymoronic phrase for the failing cycle of growth and exclusion? Maybe it’s just semantics, a new term for the toxic ‘trickle down’?