Unified growth theory

Last updated

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. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Unified growth theory suggests that during most of human existence, technological progress was offset by population growth, and living standards were near subsistence across time and space. [5] [6]

The testable predictions of the theory and its underlying mechanisms have been confirmed in empirical and quantitative research in the past decade, and have inspired intensive exploration of the impact of historical and pre-historical forces on comparative economic development and the disparity in the wealth of nations. [7] [8] [9] (d) the theory as a whole was explored quantitatively. [10] [11] Traits that were complementary to the technological environment generated higher level of income, and therefore higher reproductive success. Testable predictions of this evolutionary theory and its underlying mechanisms have been confirmed empirically [12] and quantitatively. [13]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economic growth</span> Measure of increase in market value of goods

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).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolutionary economics</span> A field in economics that considers economic evolution

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 to low birth rates and low death rates, as societies attain more technology, education and economic development. The demographic transition has occurred in most of the world over the past two centuries, bringing the unprecedented population growth of the post-Malthusian period, then reducing birth rates and population growth significantly in all regions of the world. The demographic transition strengthens economic growth process by three changes: (i) reduced dilution of capital and land stock, (ii) increased investment in human capital, and (iii) increased 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malthusianism</span> Idea about population growth and food supply

Malthusianism is a 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 has been predicted to occur if population growth outpaces agricultural production, thereby causing famine or war. According to this theory, poverty and inequality will increase as the price of assets and scarce commodities goes up due to fierce competition for these dwindling resources. This increased level of poverty eventually causes depopulation by decreasing birth rates. If asset prices keep increasing, social unrest would occur, which would likely cause a major war, revolution, or a famine. Societal collapse is an extreme but possible outcome from this process. The theory posits that such a catastrophe would force 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IZA Institute of Labor Economics</span> German think tank

The IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, until 2016 referred to as the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), is a private, independent economic research institute and academic network focused on the analysis of global labor markets and headquartered in Bonn, Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fabrizio Zilibotti</span> Italian economist

Fabrizio Zilibotti is an Italian economist. He is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. Zilibotti was previously professor of economics at University College London, the University of Zürich, and at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Income and fertility</span>

Income and fertility is the association between monetary gain on one hand, and the tendency to produce offspring on the other. There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations. The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country. In a 1974 United Nations population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating "Development is the best contraceptive." In 2015, this thesis was supported by Vogl, T.S., who concluded that increasing the cumulative educational attainment of a generation of parents was by far the most important predictor of the inverse correlation between income and fertility based on a sample of 48 developing countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geography and wealth</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cultural economics</span> Branch of economics

Cultural economics is the branch of economics that studies the relation of culture to economic outcomes. Here, 'culture' is defined by shared beliefs and preferences of respective groups. Programmatic issues include whether and how much culture matters as to economic outcomes and what its relation is to institutions. As a growing field in behavioral economics, the role of culture in economic behavior is increasingly being demonstrated to cause significant differentials in decision-making and the management and valuation of assets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oded Galor</span> Israeli-American economist (born 1953)

Oded Galor is an Israeli-American economist who is currently Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is the founder of unified growth theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Demographic economics</span> Application of economic analysis to demography

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 Galor-Zeira model, established by Oded Galor and Joseph Zeira in 1988, is the first macroeconomic model to examine the influence of economic inequality on macroeconomic dynamics. The model disputes the previously prevalent view, held by the representative agent approach in macroeconomics till the early 1990s, that economic inequality has no effect on macroeconomic activity. It posits that when there are imperfections in capital markets and indivisibilities in investment in the production of human capital, the distribution of wealth can impact both the long-term per capita income and the process of economic growth. This model was published in the paper “Income Distribution and Macroeconomics”, 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Effects of economic inequality</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David de la Croix</span>

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).

Uwe Sunde is a German economist and currently Professor of Economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) as well as a Research Professor in the ifo Center for Labour and Demographic Economics. Sunde's research interests include long-term development and growth, political economy, labour economics, population economics, and behavioural economics. In 2015, his research on risk preferences and on the role of life expectancy and human capital for long-term economic development earned him the Gossen Prize. In 2019, he was elected member of the Academia Europaea. In 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Lucerne, Switzerland.

Jeanne Lafortune is a Canadian economist who currently works as an Full Professor in Economics and Director of Research at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is also a researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which is a global research center that aims to reduce poverty and improve life quality of people in the Caribbean and Latin America. Lafortune holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on three main fields, including economic history, family and development economics.

Matthias Doepke is a German economist, currently Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Gerald F. and Marjorie G. Fitzgerald Professor of Economic History at Northwestern University. His research focuses on economic growth, development, political economy and monetary economics.

References

  1. Galor, Oded (2011). Unified Growth Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN   9781400838868.
  2. Galor, Oded (2005). "From Stagnation to Growth: Unified Growth Theory." In: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (eds.). Handbook of Economic Growth. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Edition 1, volume 1, chapter 4: 171-293.
    Galor, Oded; Weil, David N. (2000). "Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond" (PDF). American Economic Review. 90 (4): 806–828. doi:10.1257/aer.90.4.806.
  3. Ashraf, Quamrul; Galor, Oded (2011). "Dynamics and Stagnation in the Malthusian Epoch". American Economic Review. 101 (5): 2003–2041. doi:10.1257/aer.101.5.2003. PMC   4262154 . PMID   25506082.
  4. Komlos, John; Artzrouni, Marc (1990). "Mathematical Investigations of the Escape from the Malthusian Trap" (PDF). Mathematical Population Studies. 2 (4): 269–287. doi:10.1080/08898489009525313. PMID   12283330.
  5. Artzrouni, Marc (1985). Population Growth through History and the Escape from the Malthusian Trap: A Homeostatic Simulation Model (PDF). Genus 41. pp. 3–4, 21–40.
  6. "The Industrial Revolution as the Escape from the Malthusian Trap". Journal of European Economic History . 29 (2–3): 307–331. 2000.
  7. Ashraf, Quamrul; Galor, Oded (2011). "Dynamics and Stagnation in the Malthusian Epoch". American Economic Review. 101 (5): 2003–2041. doi:10.1257/aer.101.5.2003. PMC   4262154 . PMID   25506082.
  8. Franck, Raphaël; Galor, Oded (2016). "Technology-Skill Complementarity in the Early Phase of Industrialization". IZA Discussion Papers 9758 - Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    de Pleijt, Alexandra; Nuvolari, Alessandro; Weisdorf, Jacob (2018). "Human Capital Formation during the First Industrial Revolution: Evidence from the Use of Steam Engines". Journal of the European Economic Association. 18: 829–889.
  9. Becker, Sascha; Cinnirella, Francesco; Woessmann, Ludger (2010). "The trade-off between fertility and education: evidence from before the demographic transition" (PDF). Journal of Economic Growth. 15 (3): 177–204. doi:10.1007/s10887-010-9054-x. hdl: 1893/1598 . S2CID   16014490.
    Murphy, Tommy (2015). "Old habits die hard (sometimes)". Journal of Economic Growth. 20 (2): 177–222. doi:10.1007/s10887-015-9111-6. S2CID   154506639.
    Fernihough, Alan (2017). "Human capital and the quantity–quality trade-off during the demographic transition" (PDF). Journal of Economic Growth. 22 (1): 35–65. doi: 10.1007/s10887-016-9138-3 .
    Klemp, Marc; Weisdorf, Jacob (2018). "Fecundity, Fertility and the Formation of Human Capital". Economic Journal. 129: 925–960.
    Shiue, Carol H. (2017). "Human capital and fertility in Chinese clans before modern growth" (PDF). Journal of Economic Growth. 22 (4): 351–396. doi:10.1007/s10887-017-9148-9. S2CID   73715675.
  10. Lagerlöf, Nils-Petter (2006). "The Galor-Weil Model Revisited: A Quantitative Exercise". Review of Economic Dynamics. 9 (1): 116–142. doi:10.1016/j.red.2005.07.002.
  11. Galor, Oded; Moav, Omer (2002). "Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 117 (4): 1133–1191. doi:10.1162/003355302320935007. hdl: 10419/80194 .
  12. Galor, Oded; Klemp, Mark (2018). "Human Genealogy Establishes Selective Advantage to Moderate Fertility".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  13. Collins, Jason; Baer, Boris; Weber, Ernst Juerg (2014). "Economic Growth And Evolution: Parental Preference For Quality And Quantity Of Offspring" (PDF). Macroeconomic Dynamics. 18 (8): 1773–1796. doi:10.1017/s1365100513000163. S2CID   28274524.