Growth And Stability In A Mature Economy

What can prosperity possibly mean in a world of environmental and social limits? The publication of Prosperity without Growth was a landmark in the sustainability debate. Tim Jackson’s piercing challenge to conventional economics openly questioned the most highly prized goal of politicians and economists alike: the continued pursuit of exponential economic growth. Its findings provoked controversy, inspired debate and led to a new wave of research building on its arguments and conclusions. This substantially revised and re-written edition updates those arguments and considerably expands upon them. Jackson demonstrates that building a ‘post-growth’ economy is a precise, definable and meaningful task. Starting from clear first principles, he sets out the dimensions of that task: the nature of enterprise; the quality of our working lives; the structure of investment; and the role of the money supply. He shows how the economy of tomorrow may be transformed in ways that protect employment, facilitate social investment, reduce inequality and deliver both ecological and financial stability. Seven years after it was first published, Prosperity without Growth is no longer a radical narrative whispered by a marginal fringe, but an essential vision of social progress in a post-crisis world. Fulfilling that vision is simply the most urgent task of our times.

This volume collects original contributions and recent research in economic theory and the political economy of unemployment and inflation from a team of internationally renowned scholars. These essays, collected in honour of John Cornwall, demonstrate the importance of economic institutions for economic outcomes and share his focus on the need for high level economic theory to be socially relevant. The book includes an intellectual biography of the honouree by Geoff Harcourt and Mehdi Monadjemi and a full bibliography of his work.

This book studies optimal economic growth in a closed economy which experiences non-stable population growth. The economy is described by means of a neoclassical growth model which distinguishes overlapping generations within the population. The basic neoclassical growth model is extended to include various types of technical change, as well as investment in human capital or education. The research described in this book connects the analytical tools of traditional growth theory with the actual demographic experience of most industrialized countries. The role of demographic processes in the growth theoretical literature is discussed in the next section. The discussion will show that growth theory needs to extend its scope through the construction of growth models which explicitly recognize demographic forces as a potential source of non-stationarities. This book constitutes a first attempt at such a demographic extension. 1.1 Growth theory and demographic change The theory of economic growth (e.g. Solow, 1970; Burmeister & Dobell, 1970; Wan, 1971) attempts to describe and to explain the long-run development of an economic system (or, in short, economy). An economic system is essentially dynamic in nature. Among the most important sources of dynamics in economics are the following: accumulation of capital (investment); technical change; population growth. Some of these dynamic forces are, at least in part, endogenous to the economic system (i.e. determined by economic variables).

This is a thoroughly revised and expanded version of an earlier edition. Cornwall builds an economic theory and makes policy recommendations on the central issues of economic growth, full employment, stagnation, inflation, and unemployment all developed within a Post Keynesian framework. The revision carries the analysis through to the present day with the core theme being the challenge of high unemployment as the cost for conventional anti-inflationary policy.