Can economic growth be sustained? A post-malthusian perspective

摘要

Can economic growth be sustained? Is technical change the engine of economic growth? These issues have generated intense controversy since at least the early years of the industrial revolution. They emerged with even greater intensity during the last half of the twentieth century. During the late 1990s, a spurt of growth in output and productivity led the business press, and some economists, to proclaim that the economy had entered a new era in which the old rules that had governed cyclical and secular growth no longer obtained (Stiroh 1999). During the twenty-first century the United States and the other advanced industrial countries will be confronted by a new challenge: to make the service sector the driver of economic growth. In the classicalmodel of Malthus and Ricardo, growth is constrained by an inelastic supply of natural resources. In the neoclassical model, economic growth is constrained by the rate of growth of the labor force (Solow 1956; Prescott 1988). In both models the constraints on growth were released by exogenous technical change. In the new growth economics, the constraints are released by endogenous technical change driven by the accumulation of knowledge and human capital (Romer 1986, 1990, 1994; Lucas 1988, 1993). In this article I argue that future economic growth in economically advanced countries such as the United States will be constrained by low service-sector productivity.