The "anti-GDP" critique reflected above all disillusion with the supposed automatic linkage between economic growth and "development". The school of development economics in the 1980s vehemently attacked this dogmatic trend, arguing that the assessment of the impact of economic growth on development should take into account, not the aggregate volume of production represented by GDP, but above all how social dimensions such as poverty, unemployment, inequality and inequity, behaved in respo nse to the evolution of GDP.

The findings of academics such as Dudley Seers fall into this perspective. Seers (1986) ar gued that it would be peculiar to talk of "development" if, during a lengthy period of sustained economic growth, the poverty, unemployment and inequalities "…had worsened, particularly in the cases where all these dimensions had under gone deterioration, even if in purely statistical terms per capita income had doubled over the period" (in Todaro, 1986: 69-70).

It is worth stressing that the idea is not to minimise the dominant role of the economy in development. Indeed, ther e is a close relationship of complementarity and inter dependence between growth and development. Of the many linkages between economic growth and human development, let us point to four as examples:

economic growth can generate resour ces for incr eased investment in education and health, and minimise or eliminate poverty;

economic growth makes possible steady growth in incomes, if equitable distribution policies ar e guaranteed, thus constituting a material basis for development;

economic growth makes possible social equilibrium thr ough improvement in urban and rural social infrastructures
which in turn can lay the basis for driving economic performance forward;

improved economic performance in a perspective of equity incr eases the possibilities of political harmony, while at the same time pr oviding new opportunities for social development.

It is a given that development needs economic growth; but growth alone is not sufficient to generate "development" in its br oader definition.

Thus the links between development and economic growth should be promoted thr ough deliberate policies, without neglecting the fact that, just as economic growth does not take place in isolation, so access to education and health may pr ove dif ficult to obtain with a feeble and declining economy. This is one of the main ar guments in the concept of human development, whose evolution and measuring instruments we shall now analyse .