What is the meaning of a stagnant economy?
A stagnant economy is experiencing very little or no growth at all.
Whatever label you put on today’s chronic economic depression, it’s clear that a slow-growth curve is afflicting many nations’ economies. Economies are lapsing into another severe slump.
“Economic growth is not a steady process that creates economic advance at a regular pace, century after century,” asserts Robert J Gordon, American Economist. After millennia of stagnation – with scarcely any progress in most humans’ health, nutrition, longevity, or living conditions – a Big Bang of economic progress occurred with the Industrial Revolution and its follow-on decades of creativity. Transformational technologies – such as urban clean-water systems, electricity, and the automobile – changed the human condition in ways that had once been inconceivable.
So, there you have it. Economics writers are always looking for signs of change, and we excitedly leap to identify a new trend in the economy. But this time, there isn’t one. Governments are contracting, as it has in 10 of the last 11 quarters. The private sector is improving quickly enough to counteract that contraction and ensure that GDP growth is expanding. Still, more is needed to spur the robust recovery that the country sorely needs.
Africa is the world’s largest free trade area and a 1.2 billion-person market. The continent is creating an entirely new development path, harnessing the potential of its resources and people.
The Sub-Saharan region comprises low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income countries, 22 of which are fragile or conflict-affected. Africa has 13 small states characterized by a small population, limited human capital, and a confined land area.
Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is set to decelerate from 4.1% in 2021 to 3.3% in 2023 as a result of a slowdown in global growth, rising inflation exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, adverse weather conditions, a tightening in global financial conditions, and the rising risk of debt distress.
There have been few significant recent advances in areas that are genuinely critical to universal economic well-being – and nothing comparable to the earlier leaps forward in such realms as food, clothing, housing, and transportation. The era of major technological breakthroughs may be mainly over: While humanity may continue to design some modest productivity-boosting innovations, none seems likely to be as transformational as the earlier wealth-creating triumphs. Perhaps the “low-hanging fruit” has already been harvested, leaving just slim pickings now.
According to this analysis, attaining higher standards of living seems destined to become ever more difficult. Even more daunting, those innovations that manage to occur are unlikely to deliver across-the-board benefits to society, according to some analysts. That trend is already contributing to intensifying inequality and social-class stratification in the developed world – a fact such eminent economists have persuasively documented.
