Economic progress with corporations
Economic growth describes an increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and services that a society produces and consumes. While the definition of economic growth is straightforward, it is extremely difficult to measure it. Growth is often measured as an increase in household income or inflation-adjusted GDP, but it is important to keep in mind that this is not the definition of it – just like life expectancy is a measure of population health, but certainly not the definition of population health. Growth can best be described as a process of transformation. Whether one examines an economy that is already modern and industrialized or an economy at an earlier stage of development, one finds that the process of growth is uneven and unbalanced. Economic historians have attempted to develop a theory of stages through which each economy must pass as it grows.
The role of companies in the economy and their responsibilities to stakeholders and society at large has become a major topic of debate. Yet there is little clarity or consensus about how the business activity of companies impacts the economy and society. The business sector overall contributes 72 percent of GDP in the OECD, and corporations with more than $1 billion in revenue account for an increasingly large share of that. Economic growth is usually distinguished from economic development, the latter term being restricted to economies that are close to the subsistence level. The term economic growth is applied to economies already experiencing rising per capita incomes. Technological innovation that increases productivity is the key to increased prosperity. Technological improvements lead to larger, but not richer populations. If this analysis of the pre-growth economy is true then we would expect to see a positive correlation between productivity and the density of the population.
Economic value flows from companies to households via eight pathways, of which labor income and consumer surplus are the largest direct pathways. The overall business sector in the OECD, described above, includes companies of all types and represents $44 trillion in gross value added. For much of this paper, we narrow our focus to a subset of large corporations in the OECD with revenue exceeding $1 billion—about 5,000 companies in all, which together had $40 trillion in revenue and represented $17 trillion in gross value added in 2018. Much contemporary growth theory can be viewed as an attempt to develop a theoretical model that would bring the rate of growth of demand and the rate of growth of supply into line, since a model implying that capitalist systems are inherently unstable would not correspond to the historical facts. Models of growth may be classified according to whether they emphasize adjustments in demand (supply-determined models) or adjustments in supply (demand-determined models).