Unified growth theory

By Oded Galor. ChoiceReviews, 2011

801 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For most of the vast span of human history, economic growth was all but nonexistent. Then, about two centuries ago, some nations began to emerge from this epoch of economic stagnation, experiencing sustained economic growth that led to significant increases in standards of living and profoundly altered the level and distribution of wealth, population, education, and health across the globe. The question ever since has been--why?This is the first book to put forward a unified theory of economic growth that accounts for the entire growth process, from the dawn of civilization to today. Oded Galor, who founded the field of unified growth theory, identifies the historical and prehistorical forces behind the differential transition timing from stagnation to growth and the emergence of income disparity around the world. Galor shows how the interaction between technological progress and population ultimately raised the importance of education in coping with the rapidly changing technological environment, brought about significant reduction in fertility rates, and enabled some economies to devote greater resources toward a steady increase in per capita income, paving the way for sustained economic growth. - Presents a unified theory of economic growth from the dawn of civilization to today - Explains the worldwide disparities in living standards and population we see today - Provides a comprehensive overview of the three phases of the development process - Analyzes the Malthusian theory and its empirical support - Examines theories of demographic transition and their empirical significance - Explores the interaction between economic development and human evolution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9128004e8d92ec30545a26cb26f89af4495c1490

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

The past and future of knowledge-based growth (2012, unknown): “Unified Growth Theory suggests that the transition from stagnation to growth has been an inevitable by-product of the process of development (Galor 2005, 2011).”
Social Norms and the Enforcement of Laws (2017, unknown): “Third, our work is also related to several recent works modeling the evolution of culture, social norms, and cooperation, such as Acemoglu and Jackson (2013), Bisin and Verdier (2001), Doepke and Zilibotti (2008), Galor (2011), Tabellini (2008), and Voth and Voigtlander (2012).”
Modern gender roles and agricultural history: the Neolithic inheritance (2015, unknown): “Ashraf and Galor (2011) provide evidence consistent with this using the timing of the Neolithic Revolution as a proxy for technological advancement.”
Innovation, automation, and inequality: Policy challenges in the race against the machine (2020, background): “The interaction between technology, wages, and education relates our paper to the unified growth literature, where one of the core mechanisms is the rise of education triggered by technological progress (Galor and Weil, 2000; Galor and Moav, 2002; Galor, 2005; 2011).”
Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth? (2014, unknown): “1 Guinnane (2012), 2; Galor (2011), 115-40; Acemoglu (2009), 732-6.”
The role of human capital and innovation in economic development: evidence from post-Malthusian Prussia (2017, unknown): “…is one of the decisive factors in explaining why some countries became rich and others remained poor in the past two centuries (Goldin and Katz, 1998; Lucas, 2002; Glaeser et al., 2004; Hanushek and Woessmann, 2008; Jones and Romer, 2010; Galor, 2011; Acemoglu et al., 2014; Gennaioli et al., 2013).”
The democratic transition (2013, unknown): “2 Building on ideas that go back in time as far as Aristotle, Lipset (1959) argued in a seminal article that improvements in economic standards would ultimately lead to democratization: “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy”.”
Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Pre-Industrial Economy (2016, background): “Doing so allows us to go beyond the simplified representations of technological progress used in existing models of preindustrial growth, such as Galor (2011).”
The 'Out of Africa' Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development (2013, unknown): “Improvements in the technological environment during the Malthusian epoch brought about only transitory gains in per capita income, eventually leading to a larger but not richer population (Ashraf and Galor 2011).”
What Do We Learn from Schumpeterian Growth Theory (2013, unknown): “There, we refer the reader to growth textbooks (e.g. Acemoglu (2009), Aghion and Howitt (1998, 2009), Barro and Sala-i-Martin (2003), Galor (2011), Jones and Vollrath (2013), and Weil (2012)).”