Analysis of immiserizing growth phenomenon by country groups

It can be said that Malthus, Ricardo and Marx were the first contributors to the ideas underlying the phenomenon of immiserizing growth. Bhagwati was the economist who introduced immiserizing growth to the literature. Bhagwati argues that growth does not always increase the welfare of the society but sometimes leads to a loss of welfare. Today, the effects of this concept can be seen in different ways in countries due to changing markets and cyclical effects. Some countries are affected by global problems very quickly when there are negative effects in many areas such as economic, social and political; due to today's conditions and their own internal dynamics. These groups of countries, which have not progressed at the developmental level, suffer the greatest disadvantage worldwide. Developing countries may experience growth, but this growth will be accompanied by distortions in terms of trade. This study investigates the existence of immiserizing growth in low-income, lower middle-income and upper middle-income countries in terms of development level. The study uses data on growth, unemployment rate, foreign direct investment, labor force participation rate, trade deficit, openness, terms of trade, commodity terms of trade and external debt stock for the years 1991-2021. With these data, Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), PMG estimator with long-run, short-run and country coefficients, MG and DFE estimators with long-run and short-run coefficients were used to analyze the existence of immiserizing growth phenomenon. As a result of the analysis, while impoverishing growth is found in low-income and lower middle-income countries, there is no immiserizing growth in upper middle-income countries.