Population Growth in a Model of Economic Growth with Human Capital Accumulation and Horizontal R&D

This paper reconsiders the effects of population growth on per-capita income growth within a Romerian (1990)-type endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation. One important novelty of our contribution is that in the human capital accumulation equation we explicitly consider the possibility that agents’ investment in skill acquisition might be positively, negatively or not influenced at all by technological progress. We find that both the growth rate and the level of real per-capita income are independent of population size. Moreover, population growth may affect or not real per-capita income growth depending on the size of the degree of altruism of agents towards future generations and on the nature of technical progress, for given agents’ degree of altruism.