The study of economic growth is concerned with long-run changes, and therefore, historical data should be especially influential in informing the development of new theories. In this review, we draw on the recent literature to highlight areas in which study of history has played a particularly prominent role in improving our understanding of growth dynamics. Research at the intersection of historical data, theory, and empirics has the potential to reframe how we think about economic growth in much the same way that historical perspectives helped to shape the first generation of endogenous growth theories.
In recent decades, new endogenous growth theory has become popular but the ideas are not new. They go back at least as far as Adam Smith, and the subsequent contributions made notably by Alfred Marshall and Allyn Young. This book critically discusses and provides an historical perspective to the entire spectrum of endogenous growth theories starting with Adam Smith and ending with Paul Romer. It fills an important gap in the literature. While contributions of individual authors are readily available, there is no comprehensive study on the subject covering such a vast ground, critically discussing these authors in a comprehensive framework. It collates all the arguments and economic viewpoints in one collection, providing both the seasoned economist and a graduate economist with a critical comparison of origin, mechanisms, conclusions, and policy implications of these models.
The future of economic growth is one of the decisive questions of the twenty-first century. Alarmed by declining growth rates in industrialized countries, climate change, and rising socio-economic inequalities, among other challenges, more and more people demand to look for alternatives beyond growth. However, so far these current debates about sustainability, post-growth or degrowth lack a thorough historical perspective. This edited volume brings together original contributions on different aspects of the history of economic growth as a central and near-ubiquitous tenet of developmental strategies. The book addresses the origins and evolution of the growth paradigm from the seventeenth century up to the present day and also looks at sustainable development, sustainable growth, and degrowth as examples of alternative developmental models. By focusing on the mixed legacy of growth, both as a major source of expanded life expectancies and increased comfort, and as a destructive force harming personal livelihoods and threatening entire societies in the future, the editors seek to provide historical depth to the ongoing discussion on suitable principles of present and future global development. History of the Future of Economic Growth is aimed at students and academics in environmental, social, economic and international history, political science, environmental studies, and economics, as well as those interested in ongoing discussions about growth, sustainable development, degrowth, and, more generally, the future.
This ground-breaking new book builds upon the Schumpeterian creative response. The author shows that firms, in out-of-equilibrium conditions, try and react by means of introducing innovations. The success of their reaction is contingent upon their access conditions to knowledge, which are shaped by the system in which they operate. The emergence of new innovations can, in turn, knock firms further out-of-equilibrium and cause changes in the system properties that govern their access to external knowledge. This path dependent loop of interactions between the system properties and the individual actions of firms, accounts for endogenous innovation and the dynamics of the system.
