Economic-demographic interactions in long-run growth

Cliometrics confirms that Malthus’ model of the pre-industrial economy, in which increases in productivity raise population but higher population drives down wages, is a good description for much of demographic/economic history. A contributor to the Malthusian equilibrium was the Western European Marriage Pattern, the late age of female first marriage, which promised to retard the fall of living standards by restricting fertility. The demographic transition and the transition from Malthusian economies to modern economic growth attracted many Cliometric models surveyed here. A popular model component is that lower levels of mortality over many centuries increased the returns to, or preference for, human capital investment so that technical progress eventually accelerated. This initially boosted birth rates and population growth accelerated. Fertility decline was earliest and most striking in late eighteenth century France. By the 1830s the fall in French marital fertility is consistent with a response to the rising opportunity cost of children. The rest of Europe did not begin to follow until end of the nineteenth century. Interactions between the economy and migration have been modelled with Cliometric structures closely related to those of natural increase and the economy. Wages were driven up by emigration from Europe and reduced in the economies receiving immigrants

Patents as instruments for exploring innovation dynamics: Geographic and technological perspectives on "photovoltaic cells"

The recently developed Cooperative Patent Classifications (CPC) of the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) provide new options for an informed delineation of samples in both USPTO data and the Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PatStat) of EPO. Among the "technologies for the mitigation of climate change" (class Y02), we zoom in on nine material technologies for photovoltaic cells; and focus on one of them (CuInSe2) as a lead case. Two recently developed techniques for making patent maps with interactive overlays—geographical ones using Google Maps and maps based on citation relations among International Patent Classifications (IPC)—are elaborated into dynamic versions that allow for online animations and comparisons by using split screens. Various forms of animation are discussed. The longitudinal development of Rao-Stirling diversity in the IPC-based maps provided us with a heuristics for studying technological diversity in terms of generations of the technology. The longitudinal patterns are clear in USPTO data more than in PatStat data because PatStat aggregates patent information from countries in different stages of technological development, whereas one can expect USPTO patents to be competitive at the technological edge

Economic-demographic interactions in the European long run growth

Cliometrics confirms that Malthus’s model of the preindustrial economy is a good description for much of demographic-economic history; increases in productivity raise population, but higher population drives down wages. A contributor to the Malthusian equilibrium was the Western European marriage pattern, the late age of female first marriage, which promised to retard the fall of living standards by restricting fertility. The demographic transition and the transition from Malthusian economies to modern economic growth attracted many cliometric models surveyed here. A popular model component is that lower levels of mortality over many centuries increased the returns to, or preference for, human capital investment so that technical progress eventually accelerated. This initially boosted birth rates and population growth accelerated. Fertility decline was earliest and most striking in late-eighteenth-century France. By the 1830s, the fall in French marital fertility is consistent with a response to the rising opportunity cost of children. The rest of Europe did not begin to follow until near the end of the nineteenth century. Interactions between the economy and migration, mainly focused on the long nineteenth century, have been modeled with cliometric structures closely related to those of natural increase and the economy. Wages were driven up by emigration from Europe and reduced in the economies receiving immigrants