摘要:Mankind today is crossing a difficult, challenging period. After having crossedseveral phases of development, going, one by one, through the agricultural and the industrialones, without abandoning the characteristics of the tradition, nowadays the economy and thesociety are facing a new stage called the stage of knowledge. The evolutional leap is aremarkable one, but mercantilization generated the start of a deep economic crisis coupledwith two other and even stronger ones, the moral and the spiritual crises. This is the contextin which we will refer to two fundamental economic processes: economic growth anddevelopment