28/10/2004 2:24:58 pm
Growth Saves Children?s Lives. Some say that economics in general and GDP-figures in particular are just theories without effects in reality. Growth is called materialistic - something that doesn?t actually increase living standards. One of the best proofs of the opposite is the World Health Chart. The UN and Karolinska Institutet, among others, have designed it. There, one can see a strong correlation between GDP per capita (the x-axis) and how many children out of 1000 born that actually reach grown-up age (the y-axis). All the countries lie in a near perfect line. Rich countries have many children that live, poor countries don?t. And this is a correlation which has been the same for the about 100 years from which there are statistics. Hence GDP growth increases living standards in reality in the most important sense imaginable. The obvious conclusion is that a free economy that increases growth should be priority one for all countries.