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Inclusive growth has been proposed as another approach to ensuring that economic growth promotes well-being for all. At the same time, the precise definition of inclusive growth, its relation to related concepts, such as pro-poor growth, social exclusion, or inequality, is not very clear. This chapter proposes a way to define inclusive growth, differentiate from related concepts, and propose particular indicators that can be used to monitor inclusive growth in developing and developed countries.

The chapter will examine the strengths and weaknesses of the social investment approach before looking at how it can be enhanced by the inclusive growth framework which has been the subject of a major dialogue between the OECD itself with the World Bank. This chapter reflects on how well the social policy discipline is responding to the challenge of reintegration with economic policy identifying the key challenges which lie ahead for developed economies.

What have learned? Are we talking about a coherent shift in social policy perspective? What have we learned about the challenges ahead for strengthening welfare systems, and for economic and sustainable growth for all. In this final chapter we will critically consider the perspectives, and ask whether they are simply saying the same thing with different accents (e.g. different disciplinary and country foci) and whether or the extent to which they have different/unique features. Summary tables will be included to summarise approaches and lessons learned.

This chapter provides context for the volume chapters. It addresses definitional and conceptual matters concerning growth, poverty, and the time frame and level of analysis. The distinction between ‘failed inclusion’ and ‘active exclusion’ is then presented to distinguish some of the underlying causal mechanisms. Next, the centrality of political economy and politics to the analysis of immiserizing growth (IG) is explained on the grounds that many of the causal mechanisms leading to IG are public policy measures or stand to be affected by them. The relationship of IG to poverty dynamics is then explored to determine if immiserizing growth is characterized by distinct types of transitory or chronic poverty.

This chapter provides a survey of theoretical and empirical issues related to immiserizing growth (IG). It reviews historical antecedents, including the towering figures of classical political economy—Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx—who held different versions of the IG idea. A number of the causal mechanisms generating IG outcomes are then reviewed, drawing on diverse traditions of scholarship, with a focus on political economy, politics, and the policy process. Finally, the empirical literature is examined drawing on cross-country and country case information. The chapter concludes that IG is not an insignificant empirical phenomenon, which has been somewhat overlooked in light of the prevailing narrative that ‘growth is good for the poor’.

Remaking the relationship between paid work and welfare looms as the central challenge for an inclusive growth regime. Neoliberal economic policies created a legacy of high unemployment and precarity that has not been addressed by the social investment approach with its purely supply side focus. Inclusive growth insists that paid work must underpin a sustainable welfare regime. But how can this be done given the state of current labour markets? This chapter reconsiders the paid work welfare nexus.

This chapter defines inclusiveness as transforming the relative position of the poor from principal to agent. It argues that Bangladesh has achieved considerable economic and social gains since the 1990s inspite of weak governance. However challenges, some of them systemic, remain. These include sustaining GDP growth and improving social indicators in the context of better governance. The human development framework needs to be extended to include rights to development. The chapter proposes a new social compact for inclusive development in settlements inhabited by marginalized groups. It concurs with Rehman Sobhan’s idea of addressing the structure of injustice in the economy and society.

This chapter identifies the principal elements of an effective inclusive growth strategy in Sri Lanka. It observes that while successive governments have undertaken policies for inclusive growth, these have been neutralized by the protracted Civil War. It argues that conflicts affect poverty through entitlement failures, such as loss of public entitlements, loss of market/livelihood entitlements, loss of civil/social entitlements, and reverse entitlements resulting from population displacement and asset transfers. The chapter argues that the major challenge for inclusive growth in the post conflict period in Sri Lanka is to address these entitlement failures, particularly in the war-affected areas.

Neoliberalism, based on laissez-faire market ideas, had reached its social policy limits long before the financial crises of 2008. The ‘new social risks’ faced by citizens in post-industrial society led policymakers to rethink what social and economic relations should look like in the 21st century. In this volume we argue that new ideas about social investment and inclusive growth could mark a turning point in social policy.

Macro-economic policy should be evaluated and devised according to sustainability criteria alongside economic and social criteria. Economic goals, whether growth of GDP, productivity or competitiveness should not trump equity/justice or sustainability. But nor should environmental goals trump social goals. The urgent challenge addressed in this chapter is to develop a macroeconomic framework that supports ‘eco-social’ policies to pursue both goals simultaneously.

This chapter postulates that sustained economic growth in Pakistan requires a change in the institutional structure whereby the middle classes and the poor can participate as subjects of the growth process rather than merely the recipients of an uncertain ‘trickle-down’ effect. The chapter argues that the poor face markets, state institutions, and local power structures, which discriminate against their access to productive assets, financial resources, public services, and governance decisions which affect their immediate existence. It proposes a new approach to inclusive growth where equity becomes a means to a higher and more sustained growth. For achieving this, it proposes specific initiatives for the provision of productive assets to the poor, training for high-wage employment, quality health care, and equitable access over markets. Such a growth process could play an important role in countering terrorism and strengthening democracy by giving economic opportunities to the deprived sections of the population.

One of the biggest challenges for developing a new more productivist social policy approach has been the apparent absence of a new, post-neoliberal, economic model even after the global financial crisis. This chapter explores the social policy implications of the official ‘pragmatism’ of the new economic model with its ‘institutionalist’ emphases on nation states finding what works best in their own contexts rather than looking to the one size fits all approach of recent decades.

Analysts of social policy often pay more attention to the content of social policy than to its governance. It is important to assess both. Policy communities currently link the concepts of social investment and social entrepreneurship to advocate both where and how to intervene to ensure inclusive growth.The argument of the chapter is that the explicit linking of these two notions by policy-makers at several scales of authority constitutes an emerging policy paradigm. Despite variation across countries and levels (a characteristic of any paradigm) policy communities proffer the quasi-concepts of social investment and social entrepreneurship in combination as the appropriate ways to govern financing and delivery of social investments and ensure inclusive growth.

This chapter shows how we can avoid the unwanted polarisation between ‘investment’ and ‘protection’. While certain trends in postwar social policy may have encouraged that bifurcation from economic policy, this chapter shows how nearly all social policies in fact have a dual function, i.e. both productive and protective. The chapter reasserts the importance of social protection for societies seeking to revive strategies for equality in the new model of inclusive growth.

Globally, policymakers are promoted social investments as a reform strategy to increase individuals’ capacities and national economic growth. This chapter establishes a framework consisting of generational, life-course perspectives on social investments and inclusive growth. The generational perspective brings out that social investments involve horizontal redistribution, underpin the productive and reproductive social contract between generations, and the increased diversity within generations. The life-course perspective demonstrates how social issues and social investments in one life stage depend on the situation in prior life stages and affect the situation in later life stages and, possibly, in multiple dimensions.