A New-Growth Perspective on Non-Renewable Resources

This article reviews issues related to the incorporation of non-renewable resources in the theory of economic growth and development. As an offshoot of the new growth theory of the last two decades a series of contributions have studied endogenous technical change in relation to resource scarcity. We discuss the main approaches within this literature and consider questions like: How is the new literature related to the wave of resource economics of the 1970s? What light is thrown on the limits-to-growth issue? Does the existence of non-renewable resources have implications for the controversies within new growth theory?endogenous growth; innovation; non-renewable resources; knife-edge conditions; robustness; limits to growth

Strictly Endogenous Growth with Non-renewable Resources Implies an Unbounded Growth Rate.

Conventional endogenous growth theory relies on the assumption of constant returns to ”broad capital”. As Solow pointed out, the strength of this assumption is revealed by recognizing that even the slightest touch of increasing returns creates explosive growth: infinite output in finite time! But Solow’s observation ignored natural resources. What happens if non-renewable resources enter the ”growth engine”? In this case (strictly) endogenous growth requires the technology to be such that there is no upper bound on the sustainable per capita growth rate.endogenous growth; semi-endogenous growth; non-renewable resources; knife-edge

Optimal Growth when Environmental Quality is a Research Asset

If environmental quality positively affects the productivity of labor in R&D and pollution is caused by the use of a non-renewable resource, it is socially optimal to postpone extraction and to intertemporally adjust R&D effort.endogenous growth; non-renewable resources; environmental quality

Learning by Investing, Embodiment, and Speed of Convergence

This paper sets up a dynamic general equilibrium model to study how the composition of technical progress affects the asymptotic speed of convergence. The following questions are addressed: Will endogenizing a fraction of the productivity increases as coming from learning by investing help to generate a low asymptotic speed of convergence in accordance with the empirical evidence? Does it matter whether learning originates in gross or net investment? The answers to both questions turn out to be: yes, a lot. The third question addressed is: Does the speed of convergence significantly depend on the degree to which learning by investing takes the embodied form rather than the disembodied form? The answer turns out to be: no. These results point to a speed of convergence on the small side of 2% per year and possibly tending to a lower level in the future due to the rising importance of investment-specific learning in the wake of the computer revolution as the empirical evidence suggests.transitional dynamics; speed of convergence; learning by investing; embodied technological progress; decomposable dynamics

Capital Taxation, Growth, and Non-renewable Resources

The conventional view within the endogenous growth literature is that interest income taxes impede economic growth and investment subsidies promote economic growth. The present paper lays out a simple framework to see whether this is still true when non-renewable resources enter the ”growth engine” in an essential way. It is not! The framework allows a rich set of determinants of longrun growth, including some fiscal policy measures, but interest income taxes and investment subsidies are not among these. The results not only contrast with the modern literature on taxes and endogenous growth, but also with observations in the literature from the 1970’s on non-renewable resources and taxation - observations which were not based on general equilibrium considerations.non-renewable resources; endogenous growth; greenhouse effect; taxes; subsidies

When economic growth is less than exponential

This paper argues that growth theory needs a more general notion of “regularity” than that of exponential growth. We suggest that paths along which the rate of decline of the growth rate is proportional to the growth rate itself deserve attention. This opens up for considering a richer set of parameter combinations than in standard growth models. And it avoids the usual oversimplistic dichotomy of either exponential growth or stagnation. Allowing zero population growth in three different growth models (the Jones R+D-based model, a learning-by-doing model, and an embodied technical change model) serves as illustrations that a continuum of “regular” growth processes fill the whole range between exponential growth and complete stagnation