Economic Transformations
General Purpose Technologies and Long-Term Economic Growth
(Oxford University Press, 2005)
SCI 247
This book examines the long-term economic growth that has raised the West’s material living standards to levels undreamed of by counterparts in any previous time or place. The authors argue that this growth has been driven by technological revolutions that have periodically transformed the West’s economic, social and political landscape over the last 10,000 years and allowed the West to become, until recently, a dominant, technologically driven economic force.
Unique in the diversity of the analytical techniques used, the book begins with a discussion of the causes and consequences of economic growth and technological change. The authors argue that long-term economic growth is largely driven by technological evolution, sustained by the periodic arrival of pervasive technologies now known as General Purpose (GPTs) and study how these technologies have transformed the West since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Early modern science is given more importance than in most other treatments and the 19th-century demographic revolution is studied with a combination of formal models of population dynamics and historical analysis.
The authors argue that once sustained growth was established in the West, formal models can shed much light on its subsequent behaviour. They introduce a non-conventional, dynamic, non-stationary equilibrium model of GPT-driven growth as an alternative to standard economic growth models that use a single aggregate production function. Their model incorporates a range of phenomena that their historical studies show to be important, but which are excluded from other GPT models. The book concludes with a study of the policy implications that follow from their unique approach.
(Description Source: Kenneth Carlaw, Oxford University Press)
Author
Dr. Kenneth I. Carlaw is currently a professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He received his Ph.D. (2000) from Simon Fraser University, Canada and has held lecturer and senior lecturer positions at the University of Canterbury.
Dr. Carlaw’s major research focuses are in evolutionary economics applied to historical technological change and sustainable long-term economic growth and development. In particular, he and his co-authors Richard Lipsey and Clifford Bekar have written extensively on the concept of general purpose technologies (GPTs) and how they sustain the process of growth in human wellbeing through millennia. He has also written extensively on productivity and economic policy related to innovation and technological change.
Economic Transformations was the co-winner of the 2006 Joseph Schumpeter Prize for the best work in evolutionary economics over the previous two years.
Richard G. Lipsey is a professor emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University.
Clifford Bekar is an associate professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College.
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Paper ISBN: 9780199290895
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199285648
eBook ISBN: 9780199285648
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