econ

Conclusions: Growth and Its Cost

Across the 100 economies in this dataset, the fastest-growing countries since 1980 were China (9.9% CAGR), Lithuania (9.5% CAGR), and Myanmar (9.0% CAGR), while growth was slowest in United Arab Emirates (0.4%), Saudi Arabia (0.5%), and Iraq (0.7%). The gap between these groups is not just about starting points — it reflects different reform paths, trade integration, and (for several of the slowest growers) repeated financial and currency crises.

The environmental cost: growth vs. CO2 per capita

Plotting each country’s GDP-per-capita CAGR against the change in its CO2 emissions per capita shows the trade-off is real but not universal. China appear in the top ranks of both growth and emissions increase, illustrating the classic carbon-intensive growth pattern. Notably, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Estonia, Romania, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Uzbekistan, Hungary, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Georgia, United States, Iceland, Australia, Ukraine, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Slovenia, Netherlands, Italy, Finland, Canada, Germany, Greece, Angola, France combine above-average per-capita growth with flat or falling per-capita emissions — a partial decoupling of growth from emissions, likely reflecting a shift toward services, energy efficiency, or cleaner power sources.

The inequality cost

Income inequality, measured by the Gini index, widened the most in Bulgaria (+16.1 points), Hungary (+9.7 points), and Ghana (+8.2 points), and narrowed the most in Kenya (-18.4 points), Senegal (-17.8 points), and Ethiopia (-13.5 points). At the same time, the largest reductions in extreme poverty came in China (-97.0 points), Indonesia (-82.2 points), and Nepal (-80.6 points). This is the central tension in several of the fastest-growing economies: absolute poverty fell dramatically even as the income gap between top and bottom earners widened.

Takeaways

  • Rapid catch-up growth (China, Vietnam, Poland) has consistently come from opening previously closed or centrally planned economies to trade and market pricing — not from any single policy lever.
  • Growth volatility, not just growth level, separates the two groups: the slowest-growing economies in this dataset (Argentina, Italy, Japan) each experienced repeated crises or multi-decade stagnation rather than one bad decade.
  • Environmental and distributional costs are not automatic byproducts of growth — some fast-growing economies decoupled per-capita emissions from GDP growth, while others did not, suggesting policy and energy mix matter as much as growth rate itself.
  • Poverty reduction and inequality can move in opposite directions simultaneously; judging “how well” an economy grew requires looking at both, not either alone.