Publisher's Synopsis
Advanced economies have experienced an increase in material well-being since the industrial revolution. Modern innovations such as personal computers, laser surgery, jet planes and satellite communications have made us rich and transformed the way we work and live. Technological change has also brought with it a variety of social problems. It has been blamed at various times for increasing wage and income inequality, unemployment, obsolescence of physical and human capital, environmental deterioration and prolonged recessions.;To understand the contradictory effects of technological change on the economy, one must delve into structural details of the innovation process to analyze how laws, institutions, customs and regulations affect people's incentive and ability to create new knowledge and profit from it. To show how this can be done, the authors make use of Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction, the competitive process whereby entrepreneurs constantly seek new ideas that will render their rivals' ideas obsolete.;This book aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the theoretical and empirical debates raised by modern growth theory. It develops analyses that sheds light not only on economic growth, but on the many other phenomena that interact with growth, such as inequality, unemployment, capital accumulation, education, competition natural resources, international trade, economic cycles and public policy.
