This essay suggests that the evolution of human cooperation over the course of human history should be viewed as a two-layer process. A foundational layer, rooted in subsistence and ecological pressures, shaped cooperative dispositions unevenly, whereas an expansionary layer, rooted in conflict...

According to the Italian philosopher Tilgher (1922), the birth of the bourgeois society during the Pre-Industrial era involved the replacement of the Ancient Man by the Modern Man, and consisted of a reorienta- tion of efforts from spiritual exercises developing the inner self (what Marcus...

What ignited humanity's momentous ascent from millennia of stagnation to an era of sustained economic growth? And what are the roots of the vast disparities in the wealth of nations? These enduring mysteries, which have preoccupied scholars across generations, lie at the core of Unified Growth...

Domestic and foreign capital and consumption goods are imperfect substitutes in production and demand functions of the growth model by Bardhan-Lewis. We extend the model by introducing exogenous technical progress and allow for foreign debt dynamics without dropping domestic capital goods. Trade...

As the Draghi report shows, Europe needs to undergo a fundamental transformation in order to escape its 'mid-technology trap'. Mainstream economic theory offers little guidance on how to achieve this. A critical review of neoclassical growth theory shows that in these models, growth and...

Building on the HK framework, this study examines the "Solow Paradox" between R&D inputs and carbon emissions (CE) in China. We derive a production growth function with a mismatch coefficient from a multisector equilibrium model and use an extendable environmental impact assessment model to...

We study a neoclassical growth model with population growth and agents who are heterogeneous in their discount factors. Population growth is interpreted as the entry of new infinitely-lived agents with zero initial endowments who are not included in the economic calculus of existing agents. We...

This paper presents the Long-Term Growth Model–Human Capital Extension (LTGM-HC), a spreadsheet-based toolkit that projects the human capital of the workforce from 2025 to 2100 for 153 countries. The LTGM-HC simulates pre-tertiary years of schooling, education quality, and health across age...

We study a discrete-time optimal growth model with endogenous discounting. The discount factor may depend on both consumption and the capital stock, and intertemporal utility is modeled as a discounted sum of instantaneous utilities, with the sum of discount factors equal to one. We show that...

The relation between income and democracy remains debated, empirically and theoretically. We propose a broader perspective that goes beyond a uni-directional and monocausal interpretation of the income-democracy nexus by focusing on the neglected role of the transition from economic stagnation...

The Chinese economy has experienced strong economic growth for more than four decades since the implementation of the Open Door Policy in 1978. The local governments of the Chinese provinces played a decisive role in implementing the ambitious development goals envisioned by the central...

Technological change, an overwhelming fact in recent socioeconomic history, involves, as Joseph A. Schumpeter famously put it, "creative destruction" on a large scale: it gives rise to new goods, production methods, firms, organisations, and jobs, while rendering some received ones obsolete. Its...

What sparked humanity's leap from stagnation to prosperity? What lies at the core of inequality among nations? Unified Growth Theory explores the evolution of societies over the entire course of human history. It uncovers the universal wheels of change that have governed the journey of humanity,...

This contribution reviews key developments in Kaleckian economics after Kalecki, with a focus on its application to mature capitalist economies. Rather than revisiting interpretations of Kalecki's original work, the contribution highlights subsequent theoretical and empirical extensions. It...

Scrutinizing post-Keynesian theory of endogenous technical progress and Régulation Theory, this paper examines productivity growth and its variation within capitalist economies. The aim is to identify how institutions steer productivity growth. Based on the vast literature demonstrating that...

This paper analyses the contribution of the renewable and non-renewable primary energy consumption per capita and the gross fixed capital formation per capita to sustainable economic growth using two models approximated by CES-type functions. Estimates are made by applying the TRANSLOG method....

The standard result in the literature states that balanced growth is only possible with labor-augmenting technological progress. If a more general form of technical progress is considered, the Cobb-Douglas production function is typically required (Uzawa, 1961). However, we show that this result...