The Determinants of Economic Growth in the Short and Long Terms

八十年代是宏观经济学家回归增长理论并转向发展理论的十年。新的增长理论明确地处理发展问题，试图解释发展中国家和工业化国家之间人均收入水平明显不一致的原因。许多新文献的一个特点是证明扭曲和政策干预可以影响传统模型中的收入水平，也可以影响新模型中的稳定状态增长率。该理论还强调了技术、国际贸易、人力资本、规模经济的作用，以及为打破低收入均衡而协调大规模投资的可能必要性。与新增长理论相关的实证工作主要包括跨国回归。但对宏观经济政策对经济增长的长期影响的关注却少之又少。该项目的贡献在于将理论和实证文献的不同部分结合在一起，以尽可能全面地了解发展过程，并在该框架内关注政府的政策选择。该项目还将侧重于宏观经济政策对发展中国家增长率的影响。更具体地说，这个关于增长和发展的项目：(1)分离了不同国家的物质和人力资本投资对增长的贡献，并试图解释物质投资的决定因素；(2)确定政府可以做出的政策选择，以影响要素的积累及其使用效率；(3)识别并解释各国全要素生产率增长的差异；(4)重点研究了人力资本积累的技术，以及最有利于经济增长的教育政策类型问题。

The eighties were the decade in which macroeconomists returned to growth theory and turned to development. The new growth theory deals explicitly with development, seeking to account for the apparent non-convergence of per capita income levels between developing and industrialized countries. A hallmark of much of the new literature is the demonstration that distortions and policy interventions that can be shown to affect the level of income in conventional models, can affect the steady state growth rate in the new models. The theory also emphasized the roles of technology, international trade, human capital, economies of scale, and the possible need for a co-ordinated big investment push to break out of a low income equilibrium. The empirical work associated with the new growth theory consists largely of cross-country regressions. But there has been remarkably little focus on the long-term influence of macroeconomic policies on growth. The contribution of this project comes from pulling the different strands of the theoretical and empirical literatures together to achieve as comprehensive an understanding of the development process as possible, and within that framework, to focus on the policy choices that are open to governments. The project will also focus on the influence of macroeconomic policies on developing countries growth rates. More specifically, this program on growth and development: (1) isolates the contributions of physical and human capital investments to growth in different countries, and attempting to explain the determinants of physical investment; (2) identifies the policy choices that governments can make to influence the accumulation of factors and the efficiency of their use; (3) identifies and explains differences in total factor productivity growth among countries; and (4) focuses on the technologies for the accumulation of human capital, and the question of the type of educational policy that is most conducive to economic growth.