Episode 106: Theories of Economic Growth and Development

The Science of Everything Podcast

James Fodor

Natural Sciences, Science, Social Sciences

4.8 • 750 Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this fourth part of our series on economic growth and development, I outline the major theories of economic development developed over the past sixty years. I trace the development of such theories beginning with the Harrod-Domar theory, and proceeding through the Solow-Swan model, the Ramsey model, Romer's spillovers model, and endogenous growth theory, in each case discussing their key features, and analysing their strengths and weaknesses. The episode concludes with a brief survey of a range of more recent growth models focusing on modelling coordination failures and poverty traps, emphasising the work of Daron Acemoglu on economic institutions. The Recommended pre-listening is Episode 105: Economic Growth and Development Part III. If you enjoyed the podcast please consider supporting the show by making a paypal donation or becoming a patreon supporter. https://www.patreon.com/jamesfodor https://www.paypal.me/ScienceofEverything

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.
0:13.0	Oh, wow.
0:15.0	Oh, growth. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast episode 106,
0:38.3	Economic Growth and Development Part 4, Growth theories.
0:42.7	I'm your host, James Podor.
0:44.9	So, this episode is a continuation, obviously, in our series on economic growth and development.
0:50.1	And today we're going to look at growth theory.
0:53.0	So these are theories developed within the
0:54.6	economics literature that attempt to provide a generally mathematical, structural explanation
1:00.6	for the process of economic growth and how it occurs. So I've characterized this episode as
1:06.4	focusing on the how, because in the previous episode, we looked at the structural change and sort of the what,
1:12.2	the descriptive analysis of the sorts of changes that happen as a result of and through the
1:17.2	process of economic development, including changes in agriculture, urbanization, capital accumulation,
1:22.3	and rostow's stages of growth. So in this episode, we're going to kind of continue from that and put a bit
1:28.4	more structure on it by looking at how those processes occur, not just sort of a description
1:32.4	of what happens, but trying to understand the causal mechanisms at play that give rise to those
1:38.4	structural changes. And we'll do that through the guise of formal growth models. And needless to say, recommended pre-listening for
1:45.8	this episode is the previous episode, Economic Growth and Development Part 3. Strongly recommend
1:50.6	you listen to that, as this episode will make a lot more sense. Formal growth models really
1:55.9	only started to be developed following, or just sort of before and following the end of the
2:00.4	Second World War.
2:02.1	And so I'm going to start with a Harold Domar model, which dates to the 1940s, and what we're
	...

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