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The contributors to this volume seek further understanding of the microfoundations of economic growth. It focuses on three subjects that interested the great Austrian and Harvard economist, Joseph A. Schumpeter: innovation, technological change, and economic growth. The first part of the volume treats 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 combining institutions, the innovative behavior of firms, and an intuitively dynamic, macroeconomic analysis, all from a Schumpeterian perspective. It is argued that the study of micro-institutions such as firms and the evolving nature of markets are necessary ingredients to understanding macro-oriented phenomena such as economic growth. It is in this sense, then, that the book is concerned with microfoundations. Contributors are Daniele Archibugi, Spyros Arvanitis, David B. Audretsch, John R. Baldwin, Gerard Ballot, Pontus Braunerhjelm, Dagobert L. Brito, Uwe Cantner, Bo Carlsson, Robert W. Clower, Richard Day, Rinaldo Evangelista, Jan Glete, Horst Hanusch, Heinz Hollenstein, Michael D. Intrilgator, George Johnson, Joanne Johnson, Aija Leiponen, Staffan Laestadius, Richard N. Langlois, Frank M. Machovec, Maureen McKelvey, Valentina Meiciani, Douglass C. North, Giulio Perani, Andreas Pyka, Fabio Rapiti, Roberto Simonetti, Frank Stafford, Paula E. Stephan, Erol Taymaz, Clas Wihlborg, Erica R. Worth, and S. Y. Wu. Gunnar K. Eliasson is Professor of Industrial Economics, Royal Technical Institute (KTH), Stockholm. Christopher Green is Professor of Economics, McGill University. Charles R. McCann, Jr., is Research Associate, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh.

The contributors to this volume seek further understanding of the microfoundations of economic growth. It focuses on three subjects that interested the great Austrian and Harvard economist, Joseph A. Schumpeter: innovation, technological change, and economic growth. The first part of the volume treats 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 combining institutions, the innovative behavior of firms, and an intuitively dynamic, macroeconomic analysis, all from a Schumpeterian perspective. It is argued that the study of micro-institutions such as firms and the evolving nature of markets are necessary ingredients to understanding macro-oriented phenomena such as economic growth. It is in this sense, then, that the book is concerned with microfoundations. Contributors are Daniele Archibugi, Spyros Arvanitis, David B. Audretsch, John R. Baldwin, Gerard Ballot, Pontus Braunerhjelm, Dagobert L. Brito, Uwe Cantner, Bo Carlsson, Robert W. Clower, Richard Day, Rinaldo Evangelista, Jan Glete, Horst Hanusch, Heinz Hollenstein, Michael D. Intrilgator, George Johnson, Joanne Johnson, Aija Leiponen, Staffan Laestadius, Richard N. Langlois, Frank M. Machovec, Maureen McKelvey, Valentina Meiciani, Douglass C. North, Giulio Perani, Andreas Pyka, Fabio Rapiti, Roberto Simonetti, Frank Stafford, Paula E. Stephan, Erol Taymaz, Clas Wihlborg, Erica R. Worth, and S. Y. Wu. Gunnar K. Eliasson is Professor of Industrial Economics, Royal Technical Institute (KTH), Stockholm. Christopher Green is Professor of Economics, McGill University. Charles R. McCann, Jr., is Research Associate, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh.

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.

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.

A wide-reaching exploration of how technological advancements influence and shape productivity and economic growth.

Current technological developments in several industries, such as the rise of artificial intelligence and innovations associated with the green energy transition, are likely to have significant and wide-ranging effects. This volume explores the implications of rapid changes in advanced technology and considers how to conceptualize and model these advances and improve measures of productivity and economic growth. The study of these issues is facilitated both by new methods for using and integrating disparate data sources and by the availability of new data sources. The chapters in this volume leverage these developments to offer fresh insights into long-standing issues in productivity analysis and technological change.

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.

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.