Concurrency and parallelism are essential concepts in Python programming that enhance the efficiency and performance of applications. Concurrency allows multiple tasks to make progress independently, even if they do not execute simultaneously. This is particularly useful for I/O-bound tasks, where waiting for external resources can be optimized. On the other hand, parallelism involves executing multiple tasks simultaneously across different processors or cores, making it ideal for CPU-bound tasks that require heavy computations. By leveraging Python’s capabilities, such as multithreading, multiprocessing, and asyncio, developers can create responsive and efficient applications that effectively utilize system resources.