Economic growth, business cycles and products variety: exploring the role of demand satiety

摘要

The paper presents a model of economic growth based on a population of heterogeneous and interacting agents. This model succeeds to generate - in a single framework - GDP growth and cycles as well as product life cycles. Contrary to the existing literature, we find that an increasing variety of consumer goods is not a necessary condition for sustaining the economic growth when consumers are subject to satiation. Indeed, intensive creative-destruction - that is an intensive process of sectors births and deaths - appears to be a more powerful growth engine. We also find that changing consumers' satiety thresholds is likely to affect the nature of the correlation between the cyclical components of macroeconomic time series.