Patterns of growth in dual economies: challenges of development in the 21st century

This chapter attempts to examine patterns of growth in dual economies within the context of challenges of development for the 21st century. To this end, we first study the broad contours of growth and adjustments in the global economy, before, during, and after the 2008–09 global crisis. Here four general patterns emerge, namely, stagnation of wage incomes; declining investment effort; consequent decline in the rates of growth of productivity; and a compensatory rise in corporate and household indebtedness. The chapter continues with a deeper investigation of the structural sources of deindustrialization and widening duality in both labor markets and technological diffusion. Finally, we link all these ideas with the macroeconomics of global climate change and implications on the feedback effects of the economy-resource use-environmental degradation nexus.