Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).
Evolutionary economics is a school of economic thought that is inspired by evolutionary biology. Although not defined by a strict set of principles and uniting various approaches, it treats economic development as a process rather than an equilibrium and emphasizes change, innovation, complex interdependencies, self-evolving systems, and limited rationality as the drivers of economic evolution. The support for the evolutionary approach to economics in recent decades seems to have initially emerged as a criticism of the mainstream neoclassical economics, but by the beginning of the 21st century it had become part of the economic mainstream itself.
In demography, demographic transition is a phenomenon and theory which refers to the historical shift from high birth rates and high death rates in societies with minimal technology, education and economic development, to low birth rates and low death rates in societies with advanced technology, education and economic development, as well as the stages between these two scenarios. In economic growth,the demographic transition has swept the world over the past two centuries,and the unprecedented population growth of the post-Malthusian period was reversed, reducing birth rates and population growth significantly in all regions of the world, and enabling economies to translate more of the gains of factor accumulation and technological progress into per capita income growth. The demographic transition strengthens economic growth process by three changes:(i)Reduced dilution of capital and land stock(ii)Increased investment in human capital.(iii) increased the size of the labor force relative to the total population and changed age population distribution.Although this shift has occurred in many industrialized countries, the theory and model are frequently imprecise when applied to individual countries due to specific social, political and economic factors affecting particular populations.
The idea of convergence in economics is the hypothesis that poorer economies' per capita incomes will tend to grow at faster rates than richer economies. In the Solow-Swan growth model, economic growth is driven by the accumulation of physical capital until this optimum level of capital per worker, which is the "steady state" is reached, where output, consumption and capital are constant. The model predicts more rapid growth when the level of physical capital per capita is low, something often referred to as “catch up” growth. As a result, all economies should eventually converge in terms of per capita income. Developing countries have the potential to grow at a faster rate than developed countries because diminishing returns are not as strong as in capital-rich countries. Furthermore, poorer countries can replicate the production methods, technologies, and institutions of developed countries.
Malthusianism is the theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline. This event, called a Malthusian catastrophe occurs when population growth outpaces agricultural production, causing famine or war, resulting in poverty and depopulation. Such a catastrophe inevitably has the effect of forcing the population to "correct" back to a lower, more easily sustainable level. Malthusianism has been linked to a variety of political and social movements, but almost always refers to advocates of population control.
The overlapping generations (OLG) model is one of the dominating frameworks of analysis in the study of macroeconomic dynamics and economic growth. In contrast, to the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans neoclassical growth model in which individuals are infinitely-lived, in the OLG model individuals live a finite length of time, long enough to overlap with at least one period of another agent's life.
Macrohistory seeks out large, long-term trends in world history in search of ultimate patterns by a comparison of proximate details. It favors a comparative or world-historical perspective to determine the roots of changes as well as the developmental paths of society or a historical process.
Geography and wealth have long been perceived as correlated attributes of nations. Scholars such as Jeffrey D. Sachs argue that geography has a key role in the development of a nation's economic growth. For instance, nations that reside along coastal regions, or those who have access to a nearby water source, are more plentiful and able to trade with neighboring nations. In addition, countries that have a tropical climate face a significant amount of difficulties such as disease, intense weather patterns, and lower agricultural productivity. This thesis is supported by the fact that the volumes of UV radiation have a negative impact on economic activity. There are a number of studies confirming that spatial development in countries with higher levels of economic development differs from countries with lower levels of development. The correlation between geography and a nation's wealth can be observed by examining a country's GDP per capita, which takes into account a nation's economic output and population.
The Review of Economic Studies is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering economics. It was established in 1933 by a group of economists based in Britain and the United States. The original editorial team consisted of Abba P. Lerner, Paul Sweezy, and Ursula Kathleen Hicks. It is published by Oxford University Press. The journal is widely considered one of the top 5 journals in economics. It is managed by the editorial board currently chaired by Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln. The current joint managing editors are Thomas Chaney, Andrea Galeotti, Nicola Gennaioli, Veronica Guerrieri, Kurt Mitman, Francesca Molinari, Uta Schönberg, and Adam Szeidl. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 6.345.
Unified growth theory was developed in light of the alleged failure of endogenous growth theory to capture key empirical regularities in the growth processes and their contribution to the momentous rise in inequality across nations in the past two centuries.
Demographic economics or population economics is the application of economic analysis to demography, the study of human populations, including size, growth, density, distribution, and vital statistics.
The Journal of Economic Growth is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering research in economic growth and dynamic macroeconomics. It was established in 1996 and is published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal deals with both theories and their empirics, and examines the entire array of subject areas in economic growth, including neoclassical and endogenous growth models, growth and income distribution, human capital, fertility, trade, development, migration, money, the political economy, endogenous technological change, overlapping-generations models, and economic fluctuations.
The Barcelona Development Agenda is a statement of development principles formulated as a response to the prevailing Washington Consensus development model. Resulting from the collaboration of economists from both developing and developed countries at the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona, Spain, the Barcelona Development Agenda outlines seven lessons learned from previous policy failures and successes, and presents them as priorities for future economic reforms. The principles emphasize a balance of market and government economic roles, flexible economic tools, and an increased role for sustainability and equity in governance.
Giovanni Andrea Cornia, is a development economist. He is professor of economics, department of economics and management, at the University of Florence. He has previously been the director of the Regional Institute of Economic Planning of Tuscany, the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), in Helsinki, and the Economic and Policy Research Program, UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, in Florence. He was formerly also chief economist, UNICEF, New York. His main areas of professional interest are income and asset inequality, poverty, growth, child well-being, human development and mortality crises, transition economics, and institutional economics. He is author of over a dozen books and dozens of articles, reports and working papers on practical development economics issues in individual countries, regions and globally.
Tim Jackson is a British ecological economist and professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey. He is the director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), a multi-disciplinary, international research consortium which aims to understand the economic, social and political dimensions of sustainable prosperity. Tim Jackson is the author of Prosperity Without Growth and Material Concerns (1996). In 2016, he received the Hillary Laureate for exceptional mid-career Leadership. His most recent book Post Growth—Life After Capitalism was published in March 2021 by Polity Press.
The Galor-Zeira model is the first macroeconomic model to explore the role of heterogeneity in the determination of macroeconomic behavior. In contrast to the representative agent approach that dominated the field of macroeconomics till the early 1990s and argued that heterogeneity has no impact on macroeconomic activity, the model demonstrates that in the presence of capital markets imperfections and local non-convexities in the production of human capital, income distribution affects the long run level of income per-capita as well as the growth process.
In economics, secular stagnation is a condition when there is negligible or no economic growth in a market-based economy. In this context, the term secular means long-term, and is used in contrast to cyclical or short-term. It suggests a change of fundamental dynamics which would play out only in its own time. The concept was originally put forth by Alvin Hansen in 1938. According to The Economist, it was used to "describe what he feared was the fate of the American economy following the Great Depression of the early 1930s: a check to economic progress as investment opportunities were stunted by the closing of the frontier and the collapse of immigration". Warnings of impending secular stagnation have been issued after all deep recessions since the Great Depression, but the hypothesis has remained controversial.
Effects of income inequality, researchers have found, include higher rates of health and social problems, and lower rates of social goods, a lower population-wide satisfaction and happiness and even a lower level of economic growth when human capital is neglected for high-end consumption. For the top 21 industrialised countries, counting each person equally, life expectancy is lower in more unequal countries. A similar relationship exists among US states.
David de la Croix is a Belgian scholar and author in the field of economic growth and demographic economics. He is professor at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain).
Joseph Zeira is an Israeli economist. His main work is in macroeconomics, in economic growth and in the economy of Israel. He is the Aaron and Michael Chilewich Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
