At Data For India, we try not to be normative - we tell you where India stands today, through the data, and how it has changed over time, and usually not whether that is a good or bad thing, because we don't really feel those are our calls to make. When my colleague Abhishek Waghmare wrote his piece about the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for us, he examined whether it was rising or falling, and what it actually means.
But this time we did also ask ourselves - does GDP growth matter? Abhishek tried to answer this with one simple chart of what happens to life expectancy as countries get richer (in GDP per capita terms).
First of all, if this chart feels familiar to you, it was absolutely inspired by the late great Hans Rosling. If you haven't already, please watch this four-minute video and get charmed and educated at the same time with his infectious enthusiasm.
What this chart does is show a few different big shifts - the difference in life expectancy between the poorest and richest countries, countries getting richer over time, and the increase in life expectancy within countries over time as they get richer. As I wrote in an earlier edition of the Big Shift, this is something we have experienced quite viscerally in India, where life expectancy has gone on average from below 40 at Independence, to over 70 now.
But the x-axis in the chart above - the increase in GDP per capita over time - is also crucial. One of the big changes in development economics from the mid-1990s onwards was the acknowledgement that economic growth can be an important determinant of improved development outcomes. It sounds so self-evident now, but at the time, the idea was groundbreaking: over the long term, a country achieving economic growth could significantly improve maternal mortality, for instance - not solely through targeted health interventions but as a result of overall prosperity. In the years after, a more nuanced consensus has evolved to settle somewhere here - economic growth is necessary for development, but it is not enough on its own. Institutions and inequality matter too. We see this in India, where life expectancy still hinges on the circumstances of one's birth. But propelling all of these big shifts has been income growth, and, perhaps, that's the point of it all.
