Matthias Doepke_Economic Growth ch11 Matthias Doepke_Economic Growth ch11 马蒂亚斯doepke_economic增长CH11英文教材.pdf

Chapter 11 Economic Growth This chapter examines the determinants of economic growth. A startling fact about eco- nomic growth is the large variation in the growth experience of different countries in re- cent history. Some parts of the world, like the United States or Western Europe, experi- enced sustained economic growth over a period of more than 100 years, so by historical standards these countries are now enormously wealthy. This is not only true in absolute terms (i.e., GDP), but also if we measure wealth as income per capita (i.e., GDP per person). In contrast, there are countries where even today large parts of the population live close to the subsistence level, much the same as Europeans and Americans did some hundreds of years ago. Also, a group of countries that used to be relatively poor around the time of World War II managed to achieve even higher growth rates than the western industrialized countries, so their per capita incomes now approach those of western countries. Most of the members of this group are located in East Asia, like Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and so on. It proves to be difficult to explain these different growth experiences within a single model. There are models that provide an explanation for the growth experience of the now indus- trialized countries, but most of these models fail to explain why much of the world is still poor. Models that seek to explain the difference between rich and poor countries are less successful at reproducing the growth facts for industrialized countries. We will therefore approach the topic of economic growth from a number of different angles. In Section 11.1 we present a number of facts about economic growth, facts that we will seek to explain with our growth models. Section 11.2 introduces the Solow growth model, a classic in the theory of economic growth. This model is quite successful at matching a number of facts about growth in industrialized coun