Foundations of Economic Development

Foundations of Economic Development Synopsis

DYNAMIC ECONOMICS with increasing returns is extended to cope with economic growth, the business cycles and the irregular swings in the long-term development as different aspects of the same dynamical system, the economic system "as a whole". HUMAN CAPITAL emerges as the seminal concept: economic growth is in this dynamics causally reduced to the growth of human capital and thus to the growth of exact scientific knowledge. An analysis of this knowledge shows that quality education in hard sciences must be a prime target of future economic policies. A CAUSAL STRUCTURE, new in economics, underlies the extended dynamics. To enable students to study and to improve it, a detailled introduction to nonlinear causality is given, emphasizing the points relevant to this causal structure. NATIONAL ACCOUNTING and input-output dynamics are suggested to be extended to include also the production prices and production of human capital and of human time, by using a method of calculation indicated in detail in the book.