Hacking Economic Development

Abstract

This paper explores the potential use of growth hacking as a prescriptive tool in development economics from a system dynamics perspective. Growth hacking is a popular business method, and it stands as the umbrella term for attaining exponential business growth by creating and harnessing non-linear dynamics by forming virtuous cycles with creative ideas, field experimentation, and fast feedback loops. In this sense, growth hacking is inductive, non-linear, and empirical, contrasting the economic literature's deductive, linear, and abstract frameworks. Given this rationale, growth hacking can yield prescriptive and actionable insights that create virtuous cycles, avoid vicious cycles, and regulate linear economic development. Also, this perspective led to a novel definition of the quality of growth. As an extension of this definition, three development archetypes are stylized as “active,” “passive,” and “sustaining” based on reflexivity characteristics of the underlying economic subsystems.