Economic Growth and Equity

The concept of equity is synonymous with those of fairness, justice, and impartiality. All of these are highly relevant to the observation of economic processes but they have, until recently, rarely fitted into conventional economic analysis. Equity considerations are, in part, of a moral nature, and were probably for this reason deemed to be outside the realm of modern economics. On the other hand, the presence or absence of economic equity is obviously related to the long-term sustainability of economic processes and to the overall structural stability of economic systems. In that regard, equity issues are becoming more respectable in economic thinking, and they fit well in such newly flourishing areas of political economy as institutional economics and rent-seeking theory.