Reanacimiento de La teora del crecimiento

The Renaissance of Economic Growth Research

There is no doubt that one very important consequence arising from the work
of Keynes was that it led to a shift of emphasis from the classical long-run
issue of economic growth to the shorter-run issue of aggregate instability. As
Tobin (1997) emphasizes, Keynesian economics does not pretend to apply to
the long-run issues of growth and development. This is in sharp contrast to
the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the other classical economists
who sought to understand the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations
rather than focus on the issue of short-run instability. This should hardly
surprise us given the rapid self-equilibrating properties of the classical
macroeconomic
model (see Chapter 2).
Even small differences in growth rates of per capita income, if sustained
over long periods of time, lead to significant differences in relative living
standards between nations. The importance of economic growth as a basis for
improvements in human welfare cannot be overstated because the impact of
even small differentials in growth rates, when compounded over time, are
striking (see Chapter 11). Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1995) provide a simple
but illuminating example of the long-term consequences of growth differentials.
They note that the US economy grew by an annual average of 1.75 per
cent over the period 18701990 thereby raising real GDP per capita from
$2244 in 1870 to $18 258 in 1990 (measured in 1985 dollars). If growth over
the same period had been 0.75 per cent, real GDP per capita in 1990 would
have been $5519 rather than $18 258. If, on the other hand, growth had been
2.75 per cent, then real GDP per capita in the USA by 1990 would have been
$60 841. Note how this amazing difference in outcomes arises from relatively
small variations in the growth rate. David Romer (1996) has also expressed
the same point succinctly as follows: the welfare implications of long-run growth
swamp any possible effects of the short-run fluctuations that macroeconomics
traditionally focuses on. In reviewing the differential growth
performances of countries such as India, Egypt, the Asian Tigers, Japan and
the USA, and the consequences of these differentials for living standards,
Lucas (1988) comments that the consequences for human welfare involved
in questions like these are simply staggering. Once one starts to think about
them, it is hard to think about anything else. For some economists, such as
Prescott (1996), the renewed interest in growth over the last 20 years stems
from their belief that business cycle fluctuations are not costly to society
and that it is more important for economists to worry about increasing the
rate of increase in economy-wide productivity and not smoothing business
fluctuations. This position had been publicly expressed earlier by Lucas in
May 1985 when delivering his Yrjo Jahnsson lectures. There he argued that
post-1945 economic stability had been a relatively minor problem especially
in comparison to the costs of modestly reduced rates of growth
(Lucas, 1987). More recently, Lucas (2003) has repeated this message using
US performance over the last 50 years as a benchmark. Lucas argues that the

potential for welfare gains from better long-run, supply-side policies exceeds
by far the potential from further improvements in short-run demand management.
Given the significant adverse impact that poor growth performance has on
economic welfare and the resultant importance attached to growth by economists,
it is perhaps surprising that the research effort in this field has been
cyclical. Although growth issues were a major concern of the classical economists,
during the period 18701945 economists research was heavily
influenced by the marginalist revolution and was therefore predominantly
micro-oriented, being directed towards issues relating to the efficient allocation
of given resources (Blaug, 1997). For a quarter of a century after 192933,
issues relating to the Great Depression and Keyness response to that event
dominated discussion in macroeconomics.