The purpose of this paper is essentially exploratory. Its central analytical focus will be upon certain dimensions of the process of economic development which are, as yet, only very imperfectly understood. It is hoped that the formulation presented below will encourage students of disciplines outside of economics to undertake research which may, eventually, make an important contribution to our understanding of what economic growth is all about.

A convenient starting point will be to refer to the results of some recent research which has attempted to quantify the contributions of various factors to American economic growth during the past ninety years or so. Conventional economic theory suggests that the output of the economy at any point in time is a function of factor inputs and that, therefore, it ought to be possible to relate changes in output over time to systematic changes in factor inputs. An important segment of economic theory is devoted to exploring these relationships between variations in inputs and the associated variations in outputs – these relationships being summarized in the term ‘production function’.

A plausible inference of this approach is that one can explain economic growth as resulting from an acceleration in the economy's rate of capital formation. According to this view the rise in human productivity which is a central aspect of the development process is attributable to a speeding up of the rate at which the economy makes additions to its capital stock, that is to say, that the rise in output per man is essentially a function of a “capital-deepening” process.