The Growth Pole Theory

Growth pole is the concentration of technically advanced industries that stimulate economic development in associated businesses and industries. These concentrations of industries often affect the economies of geographical areas outside their immediate regions.

A third, but less known model of growth was worked out in the 1950s by the Frenchman, Fancois Perroux. Perroux divided industry as a whole into two types of sub-sector: the dynamic sub-sectors, so called ‘propellant’ industries: and the non-dynamic, ‘impelled’ industrial sectors, which had to be driven forward by the dynamic sectors. This division also had a spatial aspect in that there was a tendency to concentrate the dynamic sub-sectors in small geographical enclaves, while the others were spread out in backward regions, whose growth and development totally depended on their linkages with the growth poles.

With this emphasis on both the sector wise and the spatial concentration of growth, Perroux came to act as a kind of forerunner for the many empirical analyses that have

since been undertaken of such tendencies. It is today a conventional widespread conception that the countries in the Third World, with a few exceptions such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan — are all characterised by concentrations of growth in certain sectors and certain geographical enclaves.

It is of great benefit to mention here that this strategy of the growth pole was one of the earliest development initiatives that Zambia implemented in its search to bring about balanced development. The specific programme under which this was implemented was known as the ‘Intensive Development Zones’. Under this programme certain areas of potential growth were identified. The idea was to pump a lot of investment in those areas so that the effects of growth from them could have spill-over effects over a certain period of time. In the long run, the entire country would come to benefit from this approach.

In contrast to Perroux’s and Hirschman’s recommendation; the concentration has rarely been optimal as seen from the perspective of the theories of unbalanced growth. The concentrations observed in the third world do not, generally reflect strategic imbalances in Hirschman’s conception, or development-promoting growth rate poles in Perroux’s terminology. Rather, they represent isolated growth spots which may be interlinked and integrated into global networks but which, at the same time, have not induced growth in non-dynamic sectors of the surrounding backward areas.