Contributions à une histoire des théories de la croissance endogène

A historian’s perspective on how to deal with the Nobel frenzy I generally try to stay away from the Economics Nobel frenzy, if only because the hyper-personalization of scientific achievemen…

From its flow tide, fueled by the Cold War, to its ebbing with the anti-growth movement and the economic crises of the early 1970s, the “growthmen” of MIT stood at the center of the dominant field in ...

This paper interprets the Great Divergence as the cumulative influence of small asymmetries in technology or various initial conditions, amplified through conflict over resources. It introduces a trac...

This paper interprets the Great Divergence as the cumulative influence of small asymmetries in technology or various initial conditions, amplified through conflict over resources. It introduces a tractable framework that integrates demography, technological progress, and conflict into a unified growth model. The amplification effect of resource appropriation is characterized by conflict multipliers in both the short- and long-run. Conflict is a source of substantial divergence, as appropriation of resources allows some polities (cities, countries) to develop faster at the expense of others. Reconvergence is, however, possible through population growth, due to strategic com- plementarities in fertility decisions and staggered demographic transitions. Rich and non-linear dynamics display key features of comparative economic development between the West and the Global South, but also shed light on a variety of historical case studies that share such dynamics of divergence and reconvergence as well as more dramatic episodes of population extinction in a dominated country. Our framework can easily be extended to study the role of resource exhaustion or the fundamental trade-off between trade and conflict.