1.5 Moving the inclusive growth agenda forward

As you come to the final section of Week 1, you will be taking a brief recap of all the main arguments and issues that you have looked at so far, and will consider the following question: is IG the panacea for addressing the inequalities gap that many hold it to be?

Having learnt about some of the leading conceptual and analytical frameworks, you will revisit your definition of IG from Section 1.1.

The key features of IG are as follows:

• It is a response to a global problem of a deepening divide between the richest and poorest – the growing inequalities gap.
• Poverty-reduction is a core tenet, but there is no single definition of what constitutes poverty and how you measure it. There is also a difference around whether to focus exclusively on lifting the poorest out of poverty, or if poverty-reduction is part of wider growth across all levels of society.
• Current growth models are insufficient for addressing inequalities, which relies on more than economic outputs alone. IG is about more human-centred growth that includes non-income factors such as human capacity development, improving social and welfare services, and strengthening governance and infrastructure.
• Building from the previous point, IG is about a broader developmental agenda that seeks to improve the lives and opportunities of all members of society by fostering greater equality.

Throughout this week, you have seen the problems that come with both defining IG as a normative ideal, and empirically framing and measuring it. Not everyone is enamoured with the notion, however, as you will now see.

A perennial problem with IG has been the lack of a unified and comphrensive definition. The MIAG team was conscious of this gap from the outset, and the question of whether and how we boundary our understanding was a core question that was continually revisited over the lifetime of the project. Now that you have looked over some of the key debates and framings around IG, let’s round off the week by watching Video 1.4, in which project lead Professor Giles Mohan talks about what IG has come to mean in MIAG.

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Transcript: Video 1.4 What IG is to MIAG.

Professor Giles Mohan:

Let’s give some context around what MIAG is about and how we started it. We were hearing anecdotal evidence that there was increased migration – largely economic migration – both to and within Africa. So what MIAG has sought to do is to look at these so-called new migration flows – albeit that they build on older, established trajectories – and look at what forms of growth they’re bringing about in those African countries. And we selected Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Mozambique.

What, then, is inclusive growth? Migration scholars have long been thinking about what more encompassing views of development can we think about that relates to development. Inclusive growth has become a more popular concept within development policy, largely driven by some of the multilateral organisations like OECD and the Asian Development Bank. But I think it’s not been used systematically, in analysis, and it’s not really been linked systematically either to migration.

The impetus for moving towards inclusive growth was the deficiencies of only focusing on economic growth, and the realisation that [in] the previous 30 years or so, the growth that had occurred was largely generating greater inequalities – and therefore, it has an analytical potential, but it’s largely a very normative agenda: we want more inclusive growth rather than less, or we want less exclusive growth. Inclusive growth is, then, much more about quality of growth, rather than growth per se. And most proponents – and some of the work that was done at the bank ten, eleven years ago – argued that it had to be long-term, broad-based and covering multiple sectors. So we might see growth periods in a particular country linked to a spike in commodity demand, and rising commodity prices, but that isn’t necessarily inclusive, unless it’s sustained, if that growth spreads into other areas of the economy.

But inclusive growth is rather vague. If you look at OECD, they have this dashboard of what constitutes inclusive growth. You can just keep adding digital inclusive growth, and green inclusive growth, so you can get these very amorphous concepts. I think what we tried to do is say, ‘Well, OK, there’s some value here, how can we pin it down and apply it in our work, as opposed to trying to apply in its totality?’ And we took on what was the ‘pro-poor plus’ argument, which is arguing that we need to focus on the poor as a target group, and understand what happens during these growth episodes to the poor, but we don’t just focus on the poor – we focus on the wider development.

I think, crucially, there’s a kind of political economy analysis of the nature of political power in some of the work done at GDI under the OECD project with Sam Hickey and others. And Kunal Sen was really about how you understand the relationship between inclusive growth and the nature of the political systems in which that growth is occurring, so we’ve taken that on board.

I think we wanted to say that inclusive growth isn’t the kind of thing that you jump from A to B, and when you get to B, you’ve reached the magic world of inclusive growth – it’s much more of a process. What we’ve tried to do in MIAG is understand the multifarious mechanisms that link both economic and non-economic growth to these wellbeing outcomes.

And also, the conditions for inclusive growth are very context-dependent. Some will view that and say, ‘Well, we can’t have a general understanding of inclusive growth, because it differs everywhere,’ so we end up with just lots of little cases of what might be happening. We tried to focus on a comparative methodology across four countries, but look at it at [a] slightly finer-grain scale.

End transcript: Video 1.4 What IG is to MIAG.

Video 1.4 What IG is to MIAG.