Constituting A Root Map Towards Inclusive Growth: A Comparative Analysis
Developing and emerging countries of Asia have shown a tremendous improvement in economic growth rates couple with the significant strides in extreme poverty reduction. However, most of the economies are still facing some challenges like income and non-income disparities in sharing benefits and participation into social and economic activities. It requires attention that economic growth must be accompanied by reduction in poverty and income & non-income inequalities, and promoting equitable participation, i.e. growth must be inclusive. To address these challenges, present study presents a pioneer work to construct a unique but comprehensive inclusive growth index (IGI) over the period of last two decades for 17 Asian and 8 developed countries. The study made a comparative analysis of inclusive growth performances of developing and emerging countries of Asia and compared their final score with the benchmark set by developed countries of the world. The study highlighted the clusters of variables which required attention in developing Asia to converge with emerging Asia, and in emerging Asia to converge with developed world. In short, the study provides a root map for developing countries to merge with emerging countries, and for emerging countries to merge with developed countries.