Governments should focus on the wll-being of ther populations rather Essay

Governments should focus on the wll-being of ther populations rather than economic growth. To what extent do you agree whith thi - Essay Example This paper is therefore designed to illustrate why and how proper balances of population well-being and economic growth should be facilitated by governments. This will be illustrated by first examining how economic growth policies can be detrimental to a population’s well-being. Secondly, this paper will examine trends in satisfaction and how well-being and economic growth perform in those trends. Speth (2008) informs that the belief that fast and abundant economic growth often comes at the price of the environment (p. 24). This approach to economic growth, while attending to the immediate well-being of the population does not take into account the well-being of future generations who will ultimately have to deal with a â€Å"perilous state environmentally† (Speth 2008, p. 24). Far too often economic policies do not take account of the sacrifices to the environment. Governments in a desire to advance economic growth place far too much emphasis on technology and far too little emphasis on the cost to the environment (Speth 2008, p. 24). Acknowledging that economic growth and modern technology are necessarily intertwined in an increasingly global economy, but at the potential cost to the environment, there must be a proper balance. ... The latter implies a responsible use of the earth’s resources for economic development. By taking this approach, the government is not only ensuring economic wealth, but looking ahead to ensure that the population’s well-being and economic growth both equally protected. Norberg (2010) also takes the position that economic growth policies have focused far too much on â€Å"simply maximising production† (p. 2). Like Speth (2008), Norberg (2010) argues that this approach to government policies does not take account of the environmental costs. As a result, warnings about environmental issues, particularly global warning are changing the way that populations perceive wealth. This together with the recent global financial crisis has cultivated a lack of confidence in how well economic growth and more especially GDPs measure the well-being of populations (Norberg 2010, p.2). Norberg (2010) demonstrates why a proper balance is required to be made between economic growth and the population’s well-being. If one take the position that the environment is just as important to the population’s well-being as economic growth, it will serve no purpose to trade one for the other. For example, Norberg (2010) argues that the Happy Planet Index (HPI) introduced by the New Economics Foundations in 2006 indicates that populations in the wealthiest Western nations rank lower on the HPI than countries in Asia and Latin America (Norberg 2010, p. 5). The obvious difference here is the greater degree of development in the Western countries which necessarily correlates with greater modernization and the corresponding damages to the environment. Countries in Asia and Latin America are obviously not as developed and therefore