Economic Growth - Hardcover

Robert J. Barro; Xavier Sala I Martín

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262024594 ISBN 13: 9780262024594

Publisher: The MIT Press, 1998

Synopsis

Why do economies grow? What fixes the long-run rate of growth? These are some of the simplest, but also hardest, questions in economics. Growth of lack of it has huge consequences for a country's citizens. But for various reasons, growth theory has had long fallow patches. Happily, this is changing.

In 1956 Robert Solow developed what became the standard neo-classical model of economic growth. Counties grow, on this theory, by accumulating labour and capital. Adding either obeys diminishing returns: the more labour or capital you already have, the more you need for a further given jump in output. One consequence is that an economy with less capital ought to outgrow one with more. Generally, they do. Another is that growth should eventually drop to zero. Awkwardly, it stays positive. To save the theory, long-run growth was explained by an outside factor, technical innovation, which is not in the growth function itself—hence the label "exogenous" for the Solow family of models.

Partial as it was, the Solow model won wide acceptance and growth theory slumbered for three decades. Then came two changes. One was an attempt to add technical change and other factors to labour and capital within the growth function so that the model might predict long-run growth without leaning on outside "residuals"—the so-called "endogenous" approach. The other was a huge number of factual studies.

Barro and Sala-i-Martin explain all this and more with admirable clarity (and much demanding maths) in the first modern textbook devoted to growth theory. The main theories are examined. The stress throughout is on linking theory to fact. One of three chapters on empirical work suggests how much each of several possible factors would be needed to explain differing international growth rate—not an explanation itself, but an indispensable set of empirical benchmarks.

From The Economist, 17 February 1996

About this title

About the Author:

Robert J. Barro is Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

About Robert Barro:
"He has changed the way economists think about everything from the long-run effects of government deficits to the forces that favor economic growth."
--Sylvia Nasar, New York Times

Review:

Barro and Sala-i-Martin have done a superb job of synthesizing much of the existing theoretical and empirical research on the mechanisms and determinants of economic growth and convergence. Though it incorporates much new material, this updated version is fully accessible to a third year undergraduate student, while remaining of invaluable use to any research scholar seriously interested in growth and development economics.

(Philippe Aghion, Department of Economics, Harvard University)

This is an invaluable book for a first graduate course in economic growth. The exposition is clear and easy to follow, but also rigorous. It is an excellent stepping stone for research in the field.

(K. Daron Acemoglu, Professor of Economics, MIT)

Barro and Sala-i-Martin provide an outstanding and comprehensive treatment of growth theory and empirics―an instant classic! I learn something new every time I pull my copy from the shelf.

(Charles I. Jones, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley)

Lionel McKenzie's new monograph is a pleasure to read. Only a major contributor to economic theory could teach general equilibrium theory with such clarity and authority. The book is gracefully written and rigorous, and does an elegant job of situating competitive equilibrium theory in the economic and mathematical traditions from which it evolved.

(Robert E. Lucas, Jr., John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (1995))

About this edition

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0262024594
• ISBN 13: 9780262024594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 539