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Agriculture and Economic Growth
Theory and Measurement
Yair Mundlak
Harvard University Press, 2000

The noted economist Yair Mundlak presents here a theory of the growth of the agricultural sector within the context of a growing economy. He explores the various aspects of the dynamics of agriculture and their relationship to the dynamics of the economy at large, offering a unique blend of theory, methodology, and empirical analysis.

The rate of agricultural growth has varied across countries and over time, even though the main innovations in agricultural technology have been made available to all countries. Consequently, the difference in performance is due to the use made of the available technology. Mundlak treats the implementation of technology as an economic decision similar to decisions about resource supply and allocation. The development of agriculture, like that of other sectors, is determined to a large degree by the economic environment, especially public policies. This framework permits the author to evaluate the effects of policies on growth by examining their effects on sectoral incentives. Mundlak shows that neutral macroeconomic policies may have a stronger effect on sectoral growth than sector-specific policies.

The book contains problem sets, and will be a reference and text for graduate-level courses.

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Birth Weight and Economic Growth
Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West
W. Peter Ward
University of Chicago Press, 1993
How can the history of birth weight add to our knowledge of women's living conditions in the past? In this study of newborn weight and economic growth in Boston, Dublin, Edinburgh, Montreal, and Vienna between 1850 and 1930, W. Peter Ward explores the relation between infant size, economic development, and living standards of working-class women in the industrializing West.

Drawing on clinical records from urban maternity hospitals and outpatient services, Ward compares birth weight between cities and traces changes in fetal size during a period in which some cities experienced dramatic economic development while others stagnated. Because fetal growth is strongly affected by maternal nutrition, Ward's research sheds new light on the well-being of working-class women whose living conditions have long been obscure and exceedingly difficult to examine.

This book will interest social and economic historians, as well as scholars of women's studies and the history of medicine, and its lessons on the distribution of social benefits during economic change have immidiate relevance for today's developing countries.
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Coins, Trade, and the State
Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan
Ethan Isaac Segal
Harvard University Press, 2011

Framed by the decline of the Heian aristocracy in the late 1100s and the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, Japan’s medieval era was a chaotic period of diffuse political power and frequent military strife. This instability prevented central authorities from regulating trade, issuing currency, enforcing contracts, or guaranteeing property rights. But the lack of a strong central government did not inhibit economic growth. Rather, it created opportunities for a wider spectrum of society to participate in trade, markets, and monetization.

Peripheral elites—including merchants, warriors, rural estate managers, and religious leaders—devised new ways to circumvent older forms of exchange by importing Chinese currency, trading in local markets, and building an effective system of long-distance money remittance. Over time, the central government recognized the futility of trying to stifle these developments, and by the sixteenth century it asserted greater control over monetary matters throughout the realm.

Drawing upon diaries, tax ledgers, temple records, and government decrees, Ethan Isaac Segal chronicles how the circulation of copper currency and the expansion of trade led to the start of a market-centered economy and laid the groundwork for Japan’s transformation into an early modern society.

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Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade
Bjarne S. Jensen and Kar-yiu Wong, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1997
While endogenous growth theory has claimed success in modeling various factors of growth and providing an analysis of sustainable economic growth, most of the growth models in published work are for closed economies. The omission of international trade, which is often regarded as the engine of growth, greatly reduces their usefulness. The theory of international trade, on the other hand, is characterized by models that are mainly static. While interest in the dynamics of trade has been growing, there is still little work in this area. The success of the newly industrialized economies that have adopted trade-oriented policies suggests how limited present trade theory is in explaining and analyzing the growth of these economies.
The work collected here serves to bridge the "old" growth theory and "new" growth theory; merge growth and trade theory; suggest new analysis and techniques of economic growth; and provide analysis of new issues related to growth and trade. The first chapter surveys endogenous growth and international trade and critically reviews the endogenous growth theory with a unified framework, covering the work on both closed and open economies. Three chapters examine the dynamics of some basic trade models; two chapters focus on growth and trade with endogenous accumulation of human and public capital; two chapters on economic growth, technological progress, and international trade; and two chapters on growth and international factor movements.
Contributors include Eric W. Bond, Theo S. Eicher, Rolf Färe, Oded Galor, Shawna Grosskopf, Bjarne S. Jensen, Pantelis Kalaitzidakis, Shoukang Lin, Ngo Van Long, Kazuo Nishimura, Koji Shimomura, Kathleen Trask, Stephen J. Turnovsky, Pham Hoang Van, Henry Wan, Jr., Chunyan Wang, and Kar-yiu Wong.
Bjarne S. Jensen is Associate Professor of Economics, Copenhagen Business School. Kar-yiu Wong is Professor of Economics, University of Washington, Seattle.
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Dynamism
The Values That Drive Innovation, Job Satisfaction, and Economic Growth
Edmund Phelps, Raicho Bojilov, Hian Teck Hoon, and Gylfi Zoega
Harvard University Press, 2020

Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps and an international group of economists argue that economic health depends on the widespread presence of certain values, in particular individualism and self-expression.

Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps has long argued that the high level of innovation in the lead nations of the West was never a result of scientific discoveries plus entrepreneurship, as Schumpeter thought. Rather, modern values—particularly the individualism, vitalism, and self-expression prevailing among the people—fueled the dynamism needed for widespread, indigenous innovation. Yet finding links between nations’ values and their dynamism was a daunting task. Now, in Dynamism, Phelps and a trio of coauthors take it on.

Phelps, Raicho Bojilov, Hian Teck Hoon, and Gylfi Zoega find evidence that differences in nations’ values matter—and quite a lot. It is no accident that the most innovative countries in the West were rich in values fueling dynamism. Nor is it an accident that economic dynamism in the United States, Britain, and France has suffered as state-centered and communitarian values have moved to the fore.

The authors lay out their argument in three parts. In the first two, they extract from productivity data time series on indigenous innovation, then test the thesis on the link between values and innovation to find which values are positively and which are negatively linked. In the third part, they consider the effects of robots on innovation and wages, arguing that, even though many workers may be replaced rather than helped by robots, the long-term effects may be better than we have feared. Itself a significant display of creativity and innovation, Dynamism will stand as a key statement of the cultural preconditions for a healthy society and rewarding work.

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Economic Growth in France and Britain, 1851-1950
Charles P. Kindleberger
Harvard University Press

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Economic Growth of Nations
Total Output and Production Structure
Simon Kuznets
Harvard University Press, 1971
In the seven chapters presented here noted economist and Nobel Prize–winner Simon Kuznets summarizes the results of his studies of the economic growth of nations in modern times. Working over the last twenty years, he has concerned himself largely with national product and its components—with long-term trends in growth in total output and in labor force changes in production structure. Such comprehensive data, Kuznets maintains, in which significantly different elements are distinguished and measured, are indispensable both for observations and analysis of the essentially quantitative process of economic growth and for the search for the general and variant characteristics of this growth. He covers a variety of countries and is able to suggest valid general characteristics and test the limits within which they hold. He also provides comparisons between the economically developed and the less developed countries and evaluates the relation between per capita product and the structure of production and the movements of both over time in the course of modern economic growth.
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Energizing China
Reconciling Environmental Protection and Economic Growth
Michael B. McElroy, Chris P. Nielsen, and Peter Lydon
Harvard University Press, 1998

As China develops its booming, fossil fuel-powered economy, is it taking lessons from the history of Western industrialization and the unforeseen environmental harms that accompanied it? Given the risks of climate change, is there an imperative, shared responsibility to help China respond to the environmental effects of its coal dependence? By linking global hazards to local air pollution concerns--from indoor stove smoke to burgeoning ground-level ozone--this volume of eighteen studies seeks integrated strategies to address simultaneously a range of harmful emissions. Counterbalancing the scientific inquiry are key chapters on China's unique legal, institutional, political, and cultural factors in effective pollution control.

Energizing China, the stage-setting publication of an ongoing program of Harvard-China research collaboration, is distinguished by its conceptual breadth and spirit of exchange. Its contributors include twenty-two Western and seventeen Chinese scholars with a disciplinary reach that includes science, public health, engineering, economics, public policy, law, business, and China studies.

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Entrepreneurship, Technological Innovation, and Economic Growth
Studies in the Schumpeterian Tradition
Frederic M. Scherer and Mark Perlman, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Papers presented at the third biennial meeting of the International J. A. Schumpeter Society
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Invention and Economic Growth
Jacob Schmookler
Harvard University Press

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Lectures on Economic Growth
Robert E. Lucas Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2004

In this book the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas collects his writings on economic growth, from his seminal On the Mechanics of Economic Development to his previously unpublished 1997 Kuznets Lectures.

The chapters progress from a general theory of how growth could be sustained and why growth rates might differ in different countries, to a model of exceptional growth in certain countries in the twentieth century, to an account of the take-off of growth in the Industrial Revolution, and finally to a prediction about patterns of growth in this new century. The framework in all the chapters is a model with accumulation of both physical and human capital, with emphasis on the external benefits of human capital through diffusion of new knowledge or on-the-job learning, often stimulated by trade. The Kuznets Lectures consider the interaction of human capital growth and the demographic transition in the early stages of industrialization. In the final chapter, Lucas uses a diffusion model to illustrate the possibility that the vast intersociety income inequality created in the course of the Industrial Revolution may have already reached its peak, and that income differences will decline in this century.

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Links Between Air Quality and Economic Growth
Implications for Pittsburgh
Shanthi Nataraj
RAND Corporation, 2013
This report assesses the evidence that exists for the ways in which local air quality could influence local economic growth through health and workforce issues, quality-of-life issues, or air-quality regulations and business operations. It then extrapolates some of the existing results to the Pittsburgh region.
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Microfoundations of Economic Growth
A Schumpeterian Perspective
Gunnar Eliasson and Christopher Green, Editors; Charles R. McCann, Jr., Associate Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1998
In exploring the microfoundations of economic growth, the contributors to Microfoundations of Economic Growth focus on three subjects that were of profound interest to the great Austrian and Harvard economist, Joseph A. Schumpeter: innovation, technological change, and economic growth. Here economic growth is approached from the vantage point of individual firms and industries. Most analysis of innovation takes place at the firm or industry level, while discussion of economic growth takes place at an economy-wide level. The first part of the volume examines institutions, markets, and entrepreneurs, without which analysis of the firm makes little or no sense. The second part focuses on the firm as innovator, placing heavy emphasis on the role of knowledge formation. The subjects of innovation and knowledge formation are approached from three perspectives: theoretical; industry (case) studies; and empirical (cross section and panel data) analysis. In the third part of the book the action moves from the firm to the "macro" or economy-wide level. The volume's unique feature is in combining a look at institutions and the innovative behavior of firms with an intuitively dynamic, macroeconomic analysis, all from a Schumpeterian perspective. The contributors argue that the study of microinstitutions, such as firms and the evolving nature of markets, is necessary for understanding macro-oriented phenomena such as economic growth. It is in this sense, then, that the book is concerned with microfoundations. Sixth in a series of volumes to spring from the biennial meeting of the International Schumpeter Society, this collection draws together the main themes of the sixth meeting held in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 1996. The society, founded in 1986, is a group of economists who work to promote the scientific study of the problems of economic development and innovation along the lines suggested by Joseph Alois Schumpeter.
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The Mismeasure of Progress
Economic Growth and Its Critics
Stephen J. Macekura
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Few ideas in the past century have had wider financial, political, and governmental impact than that of economic growth. The common belief that endless economic growth, as measured by Gross Domestic Product, is not only possible but actually essential for the flourishing of civilization remains a powerful policy goal and aspiration for many. In The Mismeasure of Progress, Stephen J. Macekura exposes a historical road not taken, illuminating the stories of the activists, intellectuals, and other leaders who long argued that GDP growth was not all it was cracked up to be.

Beginning with the rise of the growth paradigm in the 1940s and 1950s and continuing through the present day, The Mismeasure of Progress is the first book on the myriad thinkers who argued against growth and the conventional way progress had been measured and defined. For growth critics, questioning the meaning and measurement of growth was a necessary first step to creating a more just, equal, and sustainable world. These critics argued that focusing on growth alone would not resolve social, political, and environmental problems, and they put forth alternate methods for defining and measuring human progress.

​In today’s global political scene—marked by vast inequalities of power and wealth and made even more fraught by a global climate emergency—the ideas presented by these earlier critics of growth resonate more loudly than ever. Economic growth appealed to many political leaders because it allowed them to avoid addressing political trade-offs and class conflict. It sustained the fiction that humans are somehow separate from nonhuman “nature,” ignoring the intimate and dense connections between the two. In order to create a truly just and equitable society, Macekura argues, we need a clear understanding of our collective needs beyond growth and more holistic definitions of progress that transcend economic metrics like GDP.
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Money, Trade, and Economic Growth
Survey Lectures in Economic History, Second edition
Harry G. Johnson
Harvard University Press

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The Mystery of Economic Growth
Elhanan Helpman
Harvard University Press, 2004

Far more than an intellectual puzzle for pundits, economists, and policymakers, economic growth--its makings and workings--is a subject that affects the well-being of billions of people around the globe. In The Mystery of Economic Growth, Elhanan Helpman discusses the vast research that has revolutionized understanding of this subject in recent years, and summarizes and explains its critical messages in clear, concise, and accessible terms.

The tale of growth economics, as Helpman tells it, is organized around a number of themes: the importance of the accumulation of physical and human capital; the effect of technological factors on the rate of this accumulation; the process of knowledge creation and its influence on productivity; the interdependence of the growth rates of different countries; and, finally, the role of economic and political institutions in encouraging accumulation, innovation, and change.

One of the leading researchers of economic growth, Helpman succinctly reviews, critiques, and integrates current research--on capital accumulation, education, productivity, trade, inequality, geography, and institutions--and clarifies its relevance for global economic inequities. In particular, he points to institutions--including property rights protection, legal systems, customs, and political systems--as the key to the mystery of economic growth. Solving this mystery could lead to policies capable of setting the poorest countries on the path toward sustained growth of per capita income and all that that implies--and Helpman's work is a welcome and necessary step in this direction.

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Natural Resource Policymaking in Developing Countries
Environment, Economic Growth, and Income Distribution
William L. Ascher and Robert Healy
Duke University Press, 1990
Drawing on case studies developed over a two-year period, 1987–1989, by Fellows in the Program in International Development Policy at Duke University, including experienced representatives from developing countries, the World Bank, and scholars, the authors integrate the growing interest in environmental protection and resource conservation into the existing body of knowledge about the political economy of developing countries.
This book is about the links that tie resource use, environmental quality, and economic development, and the way in which those links are affected by the distribution of income and resource ownership. The links may be relatively simple, as in the case of peasant farmers too poor to conserve resources for the future and with nothing to gain from sound environmental practices. Or they may be very complex—as the authors find when they demonstrate how achievement of higher incomes by the rich can increase environmentally destructive behavior by the poor. Many of the links in some way involve rural land use, whether for agriculture or forestry. Natural Resource Policymaking in Developing Countries argues that the policies that matter are not merely those dealing with resources and the environment, but a much broader set that includes income distribution and asset ownership.
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A Political Explanation of Economic Growth
State Survival, Bureaucratic Politics, and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, 1950–1985
Yongping Wu
Harvard University Press, 2005

Taiwan is a classic case of export-led industrialization. But unlike South Korea and Japan, where large firms have been the major exporters, before the late 1980s Taiwan's successful exporters were overwhelmingly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The SMEs became the engine of the entire economy, yet for many years the state virtually ignored the SMEs and their role as exporters.

What factors account for the success of the SMEs and their benign neglect by the state? The key was a strict division of labor: state and large private enterprises jointly monopolized the domestic market. This gave the SMEs a free run in export markets. How did this industrial structure come into being? The author argues that it was an unintended consequence of the state's policy toward the private sector and its political strategies for managing societal forces. Indeed, Taiwan's unique industrial structure was shaped by both the witting and the unwitting interactions of the state and the private sector. Moreover, as the author shows, this industrial policy was a product of the internal politics of the economic bureaucracy, and the formulation and implementation of economic policy hinged on mechanisms for solving differences within the state.

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Return from the World
Economic Growth and Reverse Migration in Brazil
Gregory Duff Morton
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An anthropologist’s investigation of why some Brazilians choose to leave behind a booming economy and return to their villages.

In Return from the World, anthropologist Gregory Duff Morton traces the migrations of Brazilian workers who leave a thriving labor market and return to their home villages to become peasant farmers. Morton seeks to understand what it means to turn one’s back deliberately on the promise of economic growth.

Giving up their positions in factories, at construction sites, and as domestic workers, these migrants travel thousands of miles back to villages without running water or dependable power. There, many take up subsistence farming. Some become activists with the MST, Brazil’s militant movement of landless peasants. Bringing their stories vividly to life, Morton dives into the dreams and disputes at play in finding freedom in the shared rejection of growth.
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The Role of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Economic Growth
Edited by Michael J. Andrews, Aaron Chatterji, Josh Lerner, and Scott Stern
University of Chicago Press, 2022
This volume presents studies from experts in twelve industries, providing insights into the future role of innovation and entrepreneurship in driving economic growth across sectors.

We live in an era in which innovation and entrepreneurship seem ubiquitous, particularly in regions like Silicon Valley, Boston, and the Research Triangle Park. But many metrics of economic growth, such as productivity growth and business dynamism, have been at best modest in recent years. The resolution of this apparent paradox is dramatic heterogeneity across sectors, with some industries seeing robust innovation and entrepreneurship and others seeing stagnation. By construction, the impact of innovation and entrepreneurship on overall economic performance is the cumulative impact of their effects on individual sectors. Understanding the potential for growth in the aggregate economy depends, therefore, on understanding the sector-by-sector potential for growth. This insight motivates the twelve studies of different sectors that are presented in this volume. Each study identifies specific productivity improvements enabled by innovation and entrepreneurship, for example as a result of new production technologies, increased competition, or new organizational forms. These twelve studies, along with three synthetic chapters, provide new insights on the sectoral patterns and concentration of the contributions of innovation and entrepreneurship to economic growth. 
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The Sources of Economic Growth
Richard R. Nelson
Harvard University Press, 1996

Technological advance is the key driving force behind economic growth, argues Richard Nelson. Investments in physical and human capital contribute to growth largely as handmaidens to technological advance. Technological advance needs to be understood as an evolutionary process, depending much more on ex post selection and learning than on ex ante calculation. That is why it proceeds much more rapidly under conditions of competition than under monopoly or oligopoly.

Nelson also argues that an adequate theory of economic growth must incorporate institutional change explicitly. Drawing on a deep knowledge of economic and technological history as well as the tools of economic analysis, Nelson exposes the intimate connections among government policies, science-based universities, and the growth of technology. He compares national innovation systems, and explores both the rise of the United States as the world’s premier technological power during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and the diminishing of that lead as other countries have largely caught up.

Lucid, wide-ranging, and accessible, the book examines the secrets of economic growth and why the U.S. economy has been anemic since the early 1970s.

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The Spirit of Capitalism
Nationalism and Economic Growth
Liah Greenfeld
Harvard University Press, 2003

The Spirit of Capitalism answers a fundamental question of economics, a question neither economists nor economic historians have been able to answer: what are the reasons (rather than just the conditions) for sustained economic growth? Taking her title from Max Weber's famous study on the same subject, Liah Greenfeld focuses on the problem of motivation behind the epochal change in behavior, which from the sixteenth century on has reoriented one economy after another from subsistence to profit, transforming the nature of economic activity. A detailed analysis of the development of economic consciousness in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States allows her to argue that the motivation, or "spirit," behind the modern, growth-oriented economy was not the liberation of the "rational economic actor," but rather nationalism. Nationalism committed masses of people to an endless race for national prestige and thus brought into being the phenomenon of economic competitiveness.

Nowhere has economic activity been further removed from the rational calculation of costs than in the United States, where the economy has come to be perceived as the end-all of political life and the determinant of all social progress. American "economic civilization" spurs the nation on to ever-greater economic achievement. But it turns Americans into workaholics, unsure of the purpose of their pursuits, and leads American statesmen to exaggerate the weight of economic concerns in foreign policy, often to the detriment of American political influence and the confusion of the rest of the world.

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State Taxation Policy and Economic Growth
Michael Barker, ed.
Duke University Press, 1983
This volume discusses the problems of state governments in coping with contemporary issues of redesigning taxation policies to encourage economic growth.
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Steel and Economic Growth in Mexico
By William E. Cole
University of Texas Press, 1967

Iron ore is widely distributed over the world and has been mined from ancient times, but Mexico, with a good supply of ore, was a relative newcomer to the ranks of iron- and steel-producing nations. This distinctive book offers a history of the Mexican iron and steel industry through the 1960s.

Archaeological evidence, the author states, shows that the indigenous peoples of Mexico had developed a technology of metallurgy—relying on gold, silver, copper, tin and bronze—before the arrival of the Spaniards, but those same peoples had no knowledge of iron. That knowledge and accompanying technology arrived with the conquistadores.

Extremely slow development characterized the progress of iron mining in Mexico and until the twentieth century ore mining and metal forging continued to be handled on a small scale.

By the turn of the century two occurrences had combined to give Mexico an embryonic steel market: the railroad grid had come to link Mexico’s diverse regions and Porfirio Díaz had used his personal power to eliminate interstate tariff barriers to trade. In 1900 the first integrated steel mill in Latin America was established in Monterrey—the city that was to become the capital of Mexico’s manufacturing sector.

Forty years later, shortages of steel imports provided the motivation for the second stage of growth of the steel industry. Much of the book is devoted to the study of this period of growth.

William E. Cole tells the whole story in this scholarly study, which has as its twofold purpose a complete examination of the iron and steel industry of Mexico and an assessment of the impact of that industry on other sectors of the economy. Much space is devoted to an analysis of the role of the Mexican government in promoting and regulating the steel industry and to discussion of the efficiency of the promotional tools employed by the government. Further, he studies the status of the industry in the 1960s, its production and its consumption, and presents a projection for the future.

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The Strains of Economic Growth
Labor Unrest and Social Dissatisfaction in Korea
David L. Lindauer, Jong-Gie Kim, Joung-Woo Lee, Hy-Sop Lim, Jae-Young Son, and Ezra F. Vogel
Harvard University Press, 1997

By the mid-1980s, Korea's economic and political situation was becoming volatile. Labor relations were especially contentious. The Strains of Economic Growth, a collaborative research project between the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Korea Development Institute provides an analytic history of the economic causes of the labor unrest and popular discontent of the late 1980s. Set against rapid increases in wages and employment, worker dissatisfaction is traced to patterns of income inequality and to non-pecuniary dimensions of working life, including the suppression of labor organizations. The desire for greater political freedom also played an important role in the unprecedented unrest of this period.

The conclusions of this volume are essential for understanding the labor struggles that continue in Korea today and are highly relevant for policy makers from other emerging economies that wish to benefit from both the successes and failures of Korea's experience.

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Technology, Institutions, and Economic Growth
Richard R. Nelson
Harvard University Press, 2005
This volume mounts a full-blown attack on the standard neo-classical theory of economic growth, which Richard Nelson sees as hopelessly inadequate to explain the phenomenon of economic growth. He presents an alternative theory which highlights that economic growth driven by technological advance involves disequilibrium in a fundamental and continuing way. Nelson also argues that a theory of economic growth driven by technological advance must recognize a range of institutions, such as universities, public laboratories, and government agencies, in addition to business firms and markets. He further argues that growth theories that focus on an aggregate measure of growth, such as GNP per capita, are blind to what is going on beneath the aggregate, where differing rates of advance in different sectors, and the birth and death of industries are an essential part of the growth process. The broad theory of economic growth Nelson presents sees the process as involving the co-evolution of technologies, institutions, and industry structure.
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