The Post-growth Challenge: Secular Stagnation, Inequality and the Limits to Growth

By Tim Jackson. Ecological Economics, 2019

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Critics have long questioned the feasibility (and desirability) of exponential growth on a finite planet. More recently, mainstream economists have begun to suggest some ‘secular’ limits to growth. Declining growth rates have in their turn been identified as instrumental in increased inequality and the rise of political populism. This paper explores these emerging arguments paying a particular attention to the dynamics of secular stagnation. It examines the underlying phenomenon of declining labour productivity growth and unpacks the close relationships between productivity growth, the wage rate and social inequality. It also points to the historical congruence (and potential causal links) between declining productivity growth and resource bottlenecks. Contrary to some mainstream views, this paper finds no inevitability in the rising inequality that has haunted advanced economies in recent decades, suggesting instead that it lies in the pursuit of growth at all costs, even in the face of challenging fundamentals. This strategy has hindered technological innovation, reinforced inequality and exacerbated financial instability. At the very least, this paper argues, it is now time for policy to consider seriously the possibility that low growth rates might be ‘the new normal’ and to address carefully the ‘post-growth challenge’ this poses.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33946336916c28f82edaaeeb43ce40e7a668a4f0

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Citations in the corpus

IPCC baseline scenarios have over-projected CO2 emissions and economic growth (2020, background): “…than AR5 and SSP baseline scenarios project in many regions (Christensen et al 2018), while others anticipate growth slowing dramatically across the developed world, for structural reasons (e.g. aging populations, debt, innovation slowdowns) unrelated to climate change (Gordon 2016, Jackson 2019).”
Economic Growth Quality, Environmental Sustainability, and Social Welfare in China - Provincial Assessment Based on Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) (2019, background): “These costs are unnecessarily inevitable consequences of economic expansion, but illustrate the problem associated with economic structure and growth quality (Jackson and Victor, 2016; Jackson, 2019).”
Welfare systems without economic growth: A review of the challenges and next steps for the field (2021, background): “The value generated by these activities is largely omitted from GDP statistics (Corlet Walker and Jackson, 2019; Kubiszewski et al., 2013) and it does not depend directly on economic growth.”