How Growth Really Happens

Book excerpt: Achieving economic growth is one of today's key challenges. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Best argues that to understand how successful growth happens we need an economic framework that focuses on production, governance, and skills. This production-centric framework is the culmination of three simultaneous journeys. The first has been Best's visits to hundreds of factories worldwide, starting early as the son of a labor organiser and continuing through his work as an academic and industrial consultant. The second is a survey of two hundred years of economic thought from Babbage to Krugman, with stops along the way for Marx, Marshall, Young, Penrose, Richardson, Schumpeter, Kuznets, Abramovitz, Keynes, and Jacobs. The third is a tour of historical episodes of successful and failed transformations, focusing sharply on three core elements -- the production system, business organisation, and skill formation -- and their interconnections. Best makes the case that government should create the institutional infrastructures needed to support these elements and their interconnections rather than subsidise individual enterprises.