Categories: BusinessSocial Development

The Growth Pole Theory

Growth pole is the concentration of technically advanced
industries that stimulate economic development in associated businesses and industries. These concentrations
of industries often affect the economies of geographical areas outside their immediate regions.

A
third, but less known model of growth was worked out in the 1950s by the
Frenchman, Fancois Perroux. Perroux divided
industry as a whole into two types of sub-sector: the dynamic sub-sectors, so
called ‘propellant’ industries: and the non-dynamic, ‘impelled’ industrial
sectors, which had to be driven forward by the dynamic sectors. This division also
had a spatial aspect in that there was a tendency to concentrate the dynamic
sub-sectors in small geographical enclaves, while the others were spread out in
backward regions, whose growth and development totally depended on their
linkages with the growth poles.

With
this emphasis on both the sector wise and the spatial concentration of growth,
Perroux came to act as a kind of forerunner for the many empirical analyses
that have

since
been undertaken of such tendencies. It is today a conventional widespread
conception that the countries in the Third World — with a few exceptions such
as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan — are all characterised by
concentrations of growth in certain sectors and certain geographical enclaves.

It is of great benefit to mention here that this strategy of the growth pole
was one of the earliest development initiatives that Zambia implemented in its
search to bring about balanced development. The specific programme under which
this was implemented was known as the ‘Intensive Development Zones’. Under this
programme certain areas of potential growth were identified. The idea was to
pump a lot of investment in those areas so that the effects of growth from them
could have spill-over effects over a certain period of time. In the long run,
the entire country would come to benefit from this approach.’

In contrast to
Perroux’s and Hirschman’s recommendation; the concentration has rarely been
optimal as seen from the perspective of the theories of unbalanced growth. The
concentrations observed in the third world do not, generally reflect strategic
imbalances in Hirschman’s conception, or development-promoting growth rate
poles in Perroux’s terminology. Rather, they represent isolated growth spots
which may be interlinked and integrated into global networks but which, at the
same time, have not induced growth in non-dynamic sectors of the surrounding
backward areas.