Introduction: The Empirics of Economic Growth

Macroeconomics is essentially about two things, growth and cycles. Whilst cycles have been given much attention in the past (see, for example, Keynesian Macroeconomics, following Keynes, 1936), and present, for instance the theory of real business cycles (Cooley, 1995), and New Keynesian Economics (for an overview, see Mankiw and Romer, 1991), to give just a few examples, there has not been much work in the field of economic growth between the publication of Robert Solow’s “Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” (Solow, 1956) — and its application in the field of development economics — and the reappearance of growth theory in Macroeconomics in the work of Paul Romer (Romer, 1986).