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The Search for the Sources of Growth: Areas of Ignorance, Old and New

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Moses Abramovitz
Moses Abramovitz
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.
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Abstract

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Many economic historians, like most economists, depend on standard growth accounts to provide some quantitative description of the proximate sources of growth, but this is misleading. American growth experience illustrates the difficulty. The seeming major contribution of tangible capital accumulation to nineteenth-century growth was the consequence of scale-dependent and capital-using technological progress. The large twentieth-century contributions of education and R&D conceal technology's new intangible capital-using bias. Additionally, reverse forces run from capital accumulation to technological progress. Without a greater understanding of these interactions, our knowledge of even the proximate sources of growth is incomplete.

Type
Papers Presented at the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 1993 , pp. 217 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1993

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