By and large, private, for-profit companies perform better than publicly owned companies. Competition matters because it encourages efficiency and innovation which free up resources for other investments. Poland and Russia are natural experiments in economic reform. At first, Polish Gross Domestic Product fell off a cliff, but now it's 30 percent above what it was in 1990 and climbing. Russia did not reform well and Russian GDP is only 40 percent of what it was before 1990.
Policy makes a difference between growth rates in advanced economies too.
The problem of economic development comes down to good economic policies. Next up was Rocky Mountain Institute Founder Amory Lovins. Lovins argues that earlier economic growth was based on the premise of scarce people and abundant nature and that today the opposite is the case. He makes the point, as though he had thought of it all by himself, that if companies can reduce waste, they can increase profits. If the natural environment is deteriorating, it is because we treat the ecology the same way that communists treated economics.