In discussing theories of growth a distinction must be made between theories designed to explain growth (or the lack of growth) in countries that are already developed and those concerned with countries trapped in circumstances of poverty. Most of what follows will be confined to the former.
John Maynard Keynes, detail of a watercolour by Gwen Raverat, c. 1908; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
As the British economist John Maynard Keynes pointed out in the 1930s, saving and investment are not usually done by the same persons. The desire to save does not necessarily generate investment. If savers attempt to save a larger share of their income than before (thereby consuming less) and if this is not matched by an equal increase in the desire of others to invest, total spending will decline. A natural reaction on the part of business will be to cut back on production, thereby reducing incomes earned in production. The final effect may be a cumulative movement downward as total demand becomes insufficient to employ all of the labour force. This break in the circular flow of income and expenditure suggests the possibility of a capitalist economy alternately experiencing periods of prolonged and severe unemployment (when desired savings at full employment exceed what the economy wishes to invest at full employment) and periods of serious inflation (when the inequality is reversed). This situation had not been the case historically for developed economies until the early 1970s. In the following discussion, some attention will be paid to the ways in which the various theories of growth account for this important historical fact.
Modern growth theory can be said to have started with Joseph A. Schumpeter. Unlike most Keynesian or pre-Keynesian theorists, Schumpeter laid primary stress on the role of the entrepreneur, or businessman. It was the quality of his performance that determined whether capital would grow rapidly or slowly and whether this growth would involve innovation and change—i.e., the development of new products and new productive techniques. Differences in growth rates between countries and between different periods in any one country could be traced largely to the quality of entrepreneurship. The latter in turn reflected certain historical and cultural values carried by the business class. Schumpeter also attributed much of the growth of technical progress and of the supply of labour to the entrepreneur. Thus, in more modern terminology, Schumpeter’s explanation of why demand and supply have grown more or less at the same rate would be that supply adjusted to demand while demand in turn reflected the activities and investments of the entrepreneur.
Schumpeter believed that capitalism by its very success “sows the seeds of its own destruction.” The American economist Alvin H. Hansen argued in the late 1930s that capitalism was in trouble in the United States for other reasons. According to Hansen, the closing of the geographic frontier, the decline in the rate of population growth, and the capital-saving character of recent innovations had all worked to increase the likelihood of stagnation by reducing the need for investment. The savings available in a mature economy would tend to exceed the amount that the economy would want to invest (at levels of full employment) and by progressively larger amounts as time went on. This condition naturally would lead to increasing rates of unemployment as the discrepancy between demand and potential output widened. Hansen’s views were very much coloured by the economic conditions of the 1930s. The record of the three decades after World War II did much to overcome the pessimism generated by the Great Depression.
In Keynes’s General Theory, investment played a key role in that it was presented as the most important factor governing the level of spending in an economy, despite the fact that it typically was only one-fifth to one-sixth of total spending. This paradox can be understood in terms of a concept also developed in the 1930s, the multiplier. The multiplier was the amount by which a change in investment would be multiplied in achieving its final effect on incomes or expenditures. If, for example, investment increases by $10, the extra $10 of expenditures will generate, assuming unemployed resources, an extra $10 of production and subsequently incomes in the form of wages and profit. This increase, however, is hardly the end of the matter since most of the additional incomes earned will be respent on consumer goods. If nine-tenths of any change in income is spent on consumer goods and one-tenth is saved, consumption will increase by $9. But again, one person’s expenditures are another person’s income, so that incomes now rise by $9 of which $8.1 is respent on consumer goods. The process continues until expenditures, incomes, and production have increased by $100, of which $90 is consumption and $10 the original change in investment. In this case the multiplier is 10.
But investment may be a source of instability if it is not maintained at a rate sufficient to stimulate demand for the production it is creating. Is there any guarantee that supply or productive capacity will grow at the same rate as demand so that neither excess capacity nor excess demand results? The British economist R.F. Harrod and the American economist E.D. Domar put this question in a very simple mathematical form. In their equations, the rate of growth of supply (i.e., the production function as defined above) is equal to the rate of growth of capital stock. Through investment this capital stock is augmented. The rate of growth of demand depends upon the rate of growth of investment or, more correctly, upon the rate of growth of nonconsumption expenditures. Thus investment affects both demand and supply. But the Harrod–Domar analysis still did not answer the question of what kept the system from becoming increasingly unstable.
