A theory of global economic growth in the very long-run: is a grand innovation slowdown inevitable?

Abstract

Abstract The paper shows how the original semi endogenous and balanced growth model of Phelps (1966), and my extended version of it (Gomulka, 1990), could be useful in explaining the key ‘stylized facts’ of global long-term growth so far, and in predicting its dynamics in the future. During the last two centuries the sector of R&D and education, producing qualitative changes, has been expanding in the world’s most developed countries much faster than the sector producing conventional goods. The extended model is used to explore and evaluate. the consequences for the global long-term growth of the end of this unbalanced growth, of the completion of the catching up by most of the world’s less developed countries, and of the expected eventual stabilization of the size of the world population. The theory yields a thesis, new in the literature, that the rate of global per capita GDP growth will eventually return to the historically standard very low level, thus implying that the world’s technological revolution is going to be an innovation super-fluctuation.