New Growth Theory,Technology and Learning: A Practitioner’s Guide
New Growth Theory emphasizes that economic growth results from the increasing returns
associated with new knowledge. Knowledge has different properties than other economic goods
(being non-rival, and partly excludable). The ability to grow the economy by increasing
knowledge rather than labor or capital creates opportunities for nearly boundless growth.
Markets fail to produce enough knowledge because innovators cannot capture all of the gains
associated with creating new knowledge. And because knowledge can be infinitely reused at
zero marginal cost, firms who use knowledge in production can earn quasi-monopoly profits.
All forms of knowledge, from big science to better ways to sew a shirt exhibit these properties
and contribute......
Reviews of Economic
Development Literature and
Practice: No. 4
New Growth Theory,
Technology and Learning:
A Practitioner’s Guide
Joseph Cortright
Joseph
Impresa, Inc
2001
U.S. Economic Development Administration
New Growth Theory,
Technology and Learning
A Practitioners Guide
Joseph Cortright
Reviews of Economic Development
Literature and Practice: No. 4
2001
Impresa, Inc.
1424 NE Knott Street
Portland, OR 97212
(503) 515-4524
[email protected]
This report was prepared under an award 99-07-13801 from the Economic Development Administration, U.S.
Department of Commerce. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the Economic Development Administration.
ABSTRACT
New Growth Theory emphasizes that economic growth results from the increasing returns
associated with new knowledge. Knowledge has different properties than other economic goods
(being non-rival, and partly excludable). The ability to grow the economy by increasing
knowledge rather than labor or capital creates opportunities for nearly boundless growth.
Markets fail to produce enough knowledge because innovators cannot capture all of the gains
associated with creating new knowledge. And because knowledge can be infinitely reused at
zero marginal cost, firms who use knowledge in production can earn quasi-monopoly profits.
All forms of knowledge, from big science to better ways to sew a shirt exhibit these properties
and contribute to growth. Economies with widespread increasing returns are unlikely to develop
along a unique equilibrium path. Development may be a process of creative destruction, with a
succession of monopolistically competitive technologies and firms. Markets alone may not
converge on a single most efficient solution, and technological and regional development will
tend to exhibit path dependence.
History, institutions and geography all shape the development of knowledge-based economies.
History matters because increasing returns generate positive feedbacks that tend to cause
economies to “lock in” to particular technologies and locations. Development is in part chaotic
because small events at critical times can have persistent, long term impacts on patterns of
economic activity. Institutions matter because they shape the environment for the production
and employment of new knowledge. Societies that generate and tolerate new ideas, and that
continuously adapt to changing economic and technological circumstances are a precondition to
sustained economic growth. Geography matters because knowledge doesn’t move frictionlessly
among economic actors. Important parts of knowledge are tacit, and embedded in the routines of
individuals and organizations in different places.
New Growth Theory, and the increasing returns associated with knowledge have many
implications for economic development policy. New Growth Theory underscores the importance
of investing in new knowledge creation to sustain growth. Policy makers will need to pay
careful attention to all of the factors that provide incentives for knowledge creation (research and
development, the education system, entrepreneurship and the tolerance for diversity,
macroeconomic expectations, openness to trade). Because it undermines the notion of a single,
optimal general equilibrium, New Growth Theory implies that economics will be less capable of
predicting future outcomes.
ii
CONTENTS
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................ii
Contents..................................................................................................................................... iii
Introduction ................................................................................................................................1
A Practitioners Guide to Theories for the Knowledge Based Economy .......................................1
I. What is New Growth Theory?.................................................................................................2
A. Increasing Returns to Knowledge Drive Growth.................................................................2
B. Special Characteristics of Knowledge................................................................................4
C. Implications of Increasing Returns.....................................................................................6
II. Implications of New Growth Theory ...................................................................................10
A. History Matters ...............................................................................................................10
B. Institutions Matter ...........................................................................................................16
C. Place Matters...................................................................................................................19
III. Lessons For Economic Development Policy.......................................................................25
A. Creating Knowledge is Central To Economic Development.............................................25
B. Strategic Opportunities Exist to Influence Economic Growth...........................................26
C. Every Community has Different Opportunities ................................................................27
D. Everyone Can Create Knowledge ....................................................................................28
E. Macroeconomic Policies Can Trigger Increasing Returns Growth....................................29
References ................................................................................................................................32
iii
INTRODUCTION
A PRACTITIONERS GUIDE TO THEORIES FOR THE KNOWLEDGE BASED
ECONOMY
The purpose of this paper is to provide interested readers, particularly economic development
practitioners, with an accessible, non-technical summary of the newer theories of economic
development. Our intent is neither to be exacting nor exhaustive in describing this literature, but
rather to summarize and synthesize the various strains of the literature with a practical bearing on
the policy choices confronting those who work to improve state, regional and local economies.
Most economic development practitioners labor in a world that is only distantly and unevenly
connected to the complex and frequently arcane academic debates about economic growth.
Much of the world-view of these practitioners (and in turn, policy-makers) is formed by
experience and rule-of-thumb. Even those with formal training in economics often date their
most recent studies to one or two decades ago, as an undergraduate. They may truly be, in
Keynes’ words, the slaves of some defunct economist.
The intent of this paper is not to suggest that the economics profession has coalesced around a
new theory of economic growth and development. It hasn’t; a lively debate continues between
traditional neo-classical views and a range of suggested alternatives. Our hope rather, is that by
introducing many new readers to the new thinking and theorizing about the economy, we will
broaden and enrich this debate.
The scope of this paper, like the new theorizing about the economy, transcends a number of
dimensions. The common focus is the role of new knowledge creation, and the way it plays out
in driving economic growth, its mechanics, its geography, and the critical roles of culture and
institutions.
We start with a close look at the New Growth Theory and the writings of one of its leading
theorists, Paul Romer. Romer’s work has ignited much of the intellectual attention to economic
growth in recent years, and laid out a number of the important principles that underlie other
aspects of the growth process. Specifically, careful distinctions about the nature of economic
goods, the logic underlying the models and metaphors economists use to describe the world, and
the central role for new ideas—knowledge—to shape our economic well-being are all explored.
The point here is not that neoclassical theory is wrong but that it is incomplete. In the jargon of
the trade, the stylized facts that economists use to describe the world leave out much of what
really matters. Neoclassical theory applies deductive logic to a set of assumptions about
consumer behavior and the technology of production. Adding knowledge to these models
complicates them, but makes them more realistic, and in the end, more useful.
1
I. WHAT IS NEW GROWTH THEORY?
New Growth Theory is a view of the economy that incorporates two important points. First, it
views technological progress as a product of economic activity. Previous theories treated
technology as a given, or a product of non-market forces. New Growth Theory is often called
“endogenous” growth theory, because it internalizes technology into a model of how markets
function. Second, New Growth Theory holds that unlike physical objects, knowledge and
technology are characterized by increasing returns, and these increasing returns drive the process
of growth.
This new theory addresses the fundamental questions about what makes economies grow: Why
is the world measurably richer today than a century ago? Why have some nations grown more
than others? The essential point of New Growth Theory is that knowledge drives growth.
Because ideas can be infinitely shared and reused, we can accumulate them without limit. They
are not subject to what economists call “diminishing returns.” Instead, the increasing returns to
knowledge propel economic growth.
New Growth Theory helps us make sense of the ongoing shift from a resource-based economy to
a knowledge-based economy. It underscores the point that the economic processes which create
and diffuse new knowledge are critical to shaping the growth of nations, communities and
individual firms.
A. Increasing Returns to Knowledge Drive Growth
Ultimately, all increases in standards of living can be traced to discoveries of
more valuable arrangements for the things in the earth’s crust and atmosphere . . .
No amount of savings and investment, no policy of macroeconomic fine-tuning,
no set of tax and spending incentives can generate sustained economic growth
unless it is accompanied by the countless large and small discoveries that are
required to create more value from a fixed set of natural resources (Romer 1993b,
p. 345).
Today we tend to focus on the computer and the Internet as the icons of economic progress, but
it is the process that generates new ideas and innovations, not the technologies themselves, that is
the force that sustains economic growth.
Romer is credited with stimulating New Growth Theory, but as Romer himself notes, (Romer
1994b) there is really nothing new about the theory itself. The central notion behind New
Growth Theory is increasing returns associated with new knowledge or technology. The
cornerstone of traditional economic models is decreasing or diminishing returns, the idea that at
some point as you increase the output of anything (a farm, a factory, a whole economy) the
addition of more inputs (work effort, machines, land) results in less output than did the addition
of the last unit of production. Decreasing returns are important because they result in increasing
marginal costs (that is, at some point, the cost of producing one more unit of production is higher
than the cost of producing the previous unit of production). Decreasing returns and rising
marginal costs are critical assumptions to getting the mathematical equations economists use to
describe the economy to be settling down to a unique equilibrium.
2
For economists, a world of decreasing returns has a number of useful mathematical properties.
Economies resolve themselves to stable and unique equilibrium conditions. Moreover, assuming
free entry of firms, the math of decreasing returns implies that individual firms are price-takers,
that they have no control over the market level of prices, and that markets easily and
automatically encourage the optimum levels of production and distribute output efficiently:
Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
While essential to microeconomic models—studies of the economics of individual firms—
decreasing returns have some pessimistic implications for the economy taken as a whole. If we
can expect ever diminishing returns to new machines and additional workers, this implies that
economic growth will become slower, and slower, and eventually stop. This vision of an
increasingly sluggish economy doesn’t seem to square well with the historical record.
In the 1950s, Robert Solow crafted theory that addressed this problem, building a model that
kept diminishing returns to capital and labor, but which added a third factor—technical
knowledge—that continued to prod economic productivity and growth (1957). Solow’s model
pictured technology as a continuous, ever-expanding set of knowledge that simply became
evident over time—not something that was specifically created by economic forces. This
simplification allowed economists to continue to model the economy using decreasing returns,
but only at the cost of excluding technology from the economic model itself. Because
technology was assumed to be determined by forces outside the economy, Solow’s model is
often referred to as an “exogenous” model of growth.
The model Solow devised—ultimately recognized in the 1987 Nobel Prize for economics—
became a mainstay of the economic analysis of growth. A number of economists used the basic
framework to make elaborate calculations of the relative contributions of expanding (and
improving) labor supplies, and increased capital investment to driving growth. These efforts at
“growth accounting” showed that most of the growth of the economy was due to increases in
capital and labor, and, consistent with the Solow model, assumed that what couldn’t be explained
by these factors was “the residual” attributable to improvements in technology (Fagerberg 1994).
The world described by the Solow model provided not only the basis for economic theorizing,
but also strongly shaped the policy recommendations of economists, what was taught in colleges
and universities about economic development, and what kinds of policies many governments
followed. Neoclassical theory has brought us a number of important ideas that we apply to the
world of economic policy. Taken as a whole, neoclassical assumptions lead us to conclude that
markets are generally very competitive, and don’t tend toward monopolies, that left un-impeded,
market processes usually result in optimum levels of production and allocation. They also imply
that we have relatively limited opportunities for government to promote economic ends, other
than encouraging market competition, providing adequate schooling and encouraging savings
and investment.
The New Growth Theory challenges the neoclassical model in many important ways. The
exogenous growth models developed by Solow and other neoclassical scholars largely didn’t try
to explain what caused technology to improve over time. Implying that technology “just
happened” led to an emphasis on capital accumulation and labor force improvement as sources
of growth. As Romer says: “We now know that the classical suggestion that we can grow rich
3
by accumulating more and more pieces of physical capital like fork lifts is simply wrong”
(Romer 1986). The underlying reason is that any kind of physical capital is ultimately subject to
diminishing returns; economies cannot grow simply by adding more and more of the same kind
of capital.
New Growth Theory revived an old tradition of thinking about the effects of increasing returns.
At least through the early days of the 20th century, economists were quite comfortable talking
about increasing returns as both an actual and a theoretical possibility (Buchanan and Yoon
1994). But as economists moved to an ever stronger emphasis complex mathematical
formulations of their theories, no one had the mathematical tools to model situations with
increasing returns. Assuming diminishing returns produced economic models that could be
solved with the tools of calculus at hand, and their systems of equations settled down to a single,
stable equilibrium. If one assumed increasing returns, the equations blew up, leaving the greater
part of mathematical economics in wreckage. As a result, economists restricted themselves to
diminishing returns, which didn’t present anomalies, and could be analyzed completely (Arthur
1989).
Recent economic developments have underscored the relevance of increasing returns in the
world of business. Software and the Internet, both relatively new inventions, have very high
initial or fixed costs (the cost of developing the first disk or initially programming a website) but
very low (or nearly zero) costs of serving an additional customer or user. The first copy of
Microsoft windows might cost tens of millions of dollars to make, but each additional copy can
be made for pennies.
B. Special Characteristics of Knowledge
The physical world is characterized by diminishing returns. Diminishing returns
are the result of the scarcity of physical objects. One of the most important
differences between objects and ideas . . . is that ideas are not scarce and the
process of discovery in the realm of ideas does not suffer from diminishing
returns (Romer quoted in Kurtzman 1997).
Unexpressed but implicit in Adam Smith's argument for the efficiency of the
market system are assumptions about the nature of goods and services and the
process of exchange—assumptions that fit reality less well today than they did
back in Adam Smith's day (DeLong and Froomkin 1999).
The centerpiece of New Growth Theory is the role knowledge plays in making growth possible.
Knowledge includes everything we know about the world, from the basic laws of physics, to the
blueprint for a microprocessor, to how to sew a shirt or paint a portrait. Our definition should be
very broad including not just the high tech, but also the seemingly routine.
One special aspect of knowledge makes it critical to growth. Knowledge is subject to increasing
returns because it is a non-rival good. Non-rival goods are very different from those considered
in most economic textbooks. Economists generally focus their analyses on the production and
allocation of ordinary goods and services. Two key properties of ordinary goods and services are
rivalry—only one person can use them or make use of them at a given time—and excludability
4
— one has the ability (often established in law) to exclude others from using the goods that are
yours.
Not all goods and services are rival and excludable. Economic theory has treated goods and
services that are neither rival nor excludable as a special case—“public goods”—things like
national defense, lighthouses and malaria eradication. Once provided for one person these
services are equally available to all. In neither case does having an additional consumer for these
services deprive others of its value (i.e. there is no rivalry) and neither can anyone be effectively
prevented from benefiting from the service (i.e. they are not excludable).
Free markets, economists admit, don’t do a good job of providing public goods for two reasons.
The first is the so-called “free rider” problem: because we can’t exclude anyone from receiving
the benefits of these goods and services, we don’t have any effective way of forcing anyone to
pay. Anyone who has endured a public broadcasting fundraiser will be familiar with this
problem. Some will pay for a service out of a sense of value received or civic obligation, but
many who use the service, choose not to. A second and related problem is that free markets
don’t produce enough public goods. Because there is no way to capture revenue equal to all the
benefits people receive from public goods, they don’t get produced even though they would
produce a real value to consumers in excess of their cost of production. This “market failure”
provided a reasonable justification—to economists—for government funding for many public
goods, like national defense.
The standard approach economists use has been to divide the world into two parts: private
goods—excludable and rival, and produced by markets—and public goods—non-excludable,
non-rival, and produced by government, or other non-market means, like charities. While an
important exception to the rule that markets produce optimum results, public goods tended to be
viewed as a very limited exception: we can rely on markets to produce the overwhelming
majority of goods and services, and turn to the public sector only in a few special cases.
To the extent that economic theory addressed knowledge at all, it generally tended to assume it
was simply a public good. If one makes a fundamental research breakthrough, like E=mc2, or
observes the super-conducting properties of a particular combination of metals, then this
information becomes equally available to all.
But not all ideas are pure public goods. While they are non-rival—many people can use them at
once without depriving others of their use—economically valuable ideas are at least partially
excludable. And most importantly, their excludability is more a function of socially determined
property rights than it is a function of the intrinsic character of the idea. Patents, trademarks, and
copyright law allow individuals to have certain rights to exclude others from the benefits of the
ideas they have created. Keeping ideas secret—trade secrets, confidential business
information—also allows their owner to exclude others from their benefits.
Because ideas are intangible, when we look at a good like a machine or a service, we don’t think
about the ideas embedded in it. But digital technologies have sharpened our perception of the
difference between ideas and products. Software programs, at their core, long sequences of 1’s
and 0’s encoded in magnetic media, are as close to a pure idea as one can imagine. Software is
plainly a non-rival good. The microeconomic analysis of idea production is clear. Because they
5
are non-rival, their marginal cost of production is near zero —the incremental cost of making
software available to an additional user is pennies for the diskette and nothing for the program
itself.
The non-rival quality of ideas is the attribute that drives economic growth. We can all share and
reuse ideas at zero, or nearly zero cost. As we accumulate more and more ideas, knowledge
about how the world works, and how to extract greater use out of the finite set of resources with
which the world is endowed, we enable the economy to develop further.
C. Implications of Increasing Returns
The increasing returns associated with the non-rival aspect of ideas have a number of important
implications for economic theory and how economies work. Some of these implications are a
cause for optimism; others make life more difficult, especially for economists.
1. Opportunities for Growth May be Almost Limitless
The source of economic progress is ideas. We have basically the same stock of physical
resources we have always had. Our higher standard of living stems from our improved ability to
rearrange these physical objects into forms that provide greater value. Today’s Pentium 4-based
computer has about the same quantities of copper, plastic, fiberglass, silicon and other materials
as did 1982’s IBM PC, but it’s a hundred times faster and capable of far more functions because
all of these materials have been re-arranged into a slightly different form.
Unlike the critics of the patent office at the turn of the 20th century who believed it could be
closed because nearly everything useful had already been invented, it is extremely likely that we
will never come close to discovering all or even a very significant fraction of all of the possible
useful products, inventions and processes we might create from the physical objects available to
us.
The potential for ideas to change things is enormous. Romer illustrates this with the example of
a child’s chemistry set. If one has 100 different chemicals in the set, there are more than 1030
possible combinations of 2 or more chemicals one can make (ignoring the opportunities for
varying the proportions of the ingredients). The possible number of combinations is staggering:
by Romer’s calculation if everyone on the planet had tried one combination a second for the last
20 billion years—the age of the universe—we still would have tested less than one percent of the
possible combinations (Romer 1992).
This aspect of ideas should fundamentally change our notions of the opportunities for economic
progress. Traditionally, economics has been regarded as the dismal science, because it kept
suggesting that we would eventually run into serious limits to growth in our finite world.
Concerns about environmental deterioration associated with the increased consumption of
natural resources have revived and heightened these concerns. New Growth Theory implies,
however, that we continue to increase living standards for centuries to come by steadily
improving our knowledge of how to produce more and better goods and services with ever-
smaller amounts of physical resources (Grossman and Helpman 1994).
6
2. Markets Tend to Under-Invest in Knowledge
In the physical economy, with diminishing returns, there are perfect prices; in the
knowledge economy, with its increasing returns, there are no perfect prices
(Romer quoted in Kurtzman 1997).
One virtue of the market system is that it is thought to provide the right signals to producers and
consumers about whether to use more or less of a commodity. High prices tell consumers to
consume less, and producers to produce more. Low prices discourage production and encourage
consumption. Markets thus tend toward equilibrium—the cost of the last unit produced is
always just equal to its value to the person consuming it. To the economist’s eye, this results in
the optimal levels of production and consumption of every given commodity.
But in the case of knowledge, markets may not send the right price signals. The social benefits
and the private costs of new knowledge creation diverge. Because additional use of knowledge
has zero marginal cost, once the knowledge is created, any positive price for knowledge is too
high. Because knowledge isn’t fully excludable, entrepreneurs get paid less than the social value
of their knowledge, and they don’t have sufficient incentives to distribute it widely or invest in
creating more.
The difficulty and uncertainty of being able to capture the value associated with an invention is a
real problem. Xerox may have invented the mouse and the graphical user interface for
computers, but Apple and Microsoft made all of the money associated with selling the products
that incorporated these ideas (Jarboe and Atkinson 1998). Knowledge spillovers mean that
investors have smaller incentives to invest in knowledge than they do in more tangible things,
like machinery, that they can control.
As a result, many socially valuable investments in knowledge may not be made. Rather than
investing in knowledge creation which may have huge returns (which an investor can only partly
capture), private investors find it more profitable to invest in less valuable investments from
which they can appropriate more of the gains. The gap between the social returns of research
investment and their private returns is evidence of the inability of firms to capture the benefits of
their research (Nelson and Romer 1996). Careful econometric studies have repeatedly shown
that the social rate of return to research (the value of all of the economic benefits received by
society) is typically two to five times higher than that private rate of return (the profits accruing
to the individual or the company that pioneered the innovation) (Jarboe and Atkinson 1998).
The traditional solution to dealing with spillovers, granting strong property rights for the fruits of
an invention, may also have negative consequences. Letting someone have a patent on the
blinking cursor or on iterative looping in a computer program, would likely stifle the
development of technology (Nelson and Romer 1996). As a result no simple market
arrangement will result in the optimum incentives for both the discovery of new knowledge and,
at the same time, its most efficient allocation throughout the economy.
7
3. Knowledge-Based Economies Tend Toward Monopolistic Competition
We must recognize that ideas are economic goods which are unlike conventional
private goods and that markets are inherently less successful at producing and
transmitting ideas than they are with private goods (Romer 1992, p. 89).
A market for knowledge has different competitive dynamics than a market for ordinary goods
and services. Because knowledge has increasing returns (continuously declining marginal costs),
having the largest market share produces the highest profits. As the leading producer faces
permanently declining costs—the next unit of output can be produced even more cheaply than
the last—whoever has the leading position in the market can maintain and extend it. Eventually,
it is likely that a single firm will dominate or monopolize the market. This is exactly the concern
raised in the federal anti-trust case against Microsoft.
This outcome is different than is the case with physical goods that have decreasing returns. As
the largest firms increase production in an industry with diseconomies of scale, they face
increasing costs. The next unit of output costs more than the last unit, and they find it difficult to
undercut the prices charged by their competitors. In contrast, for products characterized by
increasing returns, leading firms tend to build up insurmountable advantages (their larger output
gives them ever lower costs), and new entrants face the difficult prospect of starting out with
much higher costs that their established competitors. The result is that markets with increasing
returns tend to be characterized by monopolies.
Knowledge-based economies tend towards what economists call monopolistic competition.
Businesses compete with one another, not based on the price of similar products, but based on
their monopoly position with a particular differentiated product or service. Competition occurs
not based on cutting prices, but in augmenting product characteristics—variety, quality,
features—and introducing new products. This is a competitive market, but a very different one
from the smoothly adjusting equilibrium model of neoclassical economics. While this kind of
competition may have negligible effects in certain markets—like sales of popular music—it
could have huge implications for the economy in others—operating systems software.
This was a relatively small problem when most of the economy was composed of goods, and
only a relatively small fraction of economic output was knowledge based products and services,
like software. In today's economy, knowledge is coming to represent a larger fraction of the
products and services we consume (Arthur 1996).
8
4. Economic Outcomes are Indeterminate; Multiple Equilibria are Possible
Once we admit that there is room for newness – that there are vastly more
conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes – we must confront the fact that
there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular justification for
why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrarily small perturbations
along the way could have made the world as we know it turn out very differently
(Romer 1994b, p. 9).
One of the corollaries of the nearly limitless opportunities for growth implied by New Growth
Theory is that the world we live in is only one possible arrangement of people, technologies and
institutions that is conceivably possible.
As Plato noted long ago, there is a natural tendency on the part of humans to assume that the
world that we inhabit turned out the only way it could have. We tend to believe in plenitude, the
notion that the world is complete, and that everything that can exist does exist (Romer 1994b). It
is difficult to comprehend all of the different possibilities, for human development and for
technology that might have occurred had things been even slightly different. Suppose that the
comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago had missed: life on earth would undoubtedly look
very different than it does. We look at things as they are, and assume that they are the product of
an inexorable, determinate process. To realize just how tenuous and improbable just
technological developments have been, one needs only look at the arcane and unpredictable
paths that have led to the world’s major scientific discoveries (Burke 1978).
Traditional economic theories exhibit this bias. As Romer points out, the standard
microeconomic model echoes the notion of plenitude, assuming that all goods and services
already exist, and that the sole job of markets is to allocate them among competing uses. The
notion of a unique equilibrium implies that market processes are deterministic: that they
automatically select the single best outcome (Romer 1994b). Increasing returns, however, imply
the possibility of multiple equilibria.
This line of reasoning quickly leads to the domain of chaos theory. A number of economists
have drawn the connection between economic development and the application of chaos theory
in biology and physics (Arthur 1996). Chaos theory models the behavior of complex systems of
interacting independent agents that exhibit spontaneous self-organization, positive feedback and
learning and an indeterminacy of outcomes (Waldrop 1992). While some believe that chaos
theory should lead economics to abandon its traditional equilibrium models, others believe that
essential aspects of chaos mechanics can be incorporated into the microeconomic framework.
(Krugman 1996). The theoretical debate on this point has apparently only begun.
Although increasing returns pose enormous difficulties for theorists and modelers—the future
really is unpredictable—they may be a hopeful sign for policy makers. If small actions taken at
the right time can produce disproportionate and lasting returns, and if there are many possible
efficient futures for the economy, there may be room for public policy to influence which road
we take.
9
II. IMPLICATIONS OF NEW GROWTH THEORY
The New Growth Theory has impressed economists to the point that it is likely to lead academics
to revise textbooks. But should policymakers care? There are a number of practical implications
from New Growth Theory that should guide us as we think about how to formulate programs
designed to stimulate economic growth. If we accept the theory, it should lead us to change our
views of the importance of history in shaping development trajectories, in the role of institutions
in providing a framework for growth. It should also revive our interest in the importance of
place to development.
A. History Matters
When they are used together, economic history and New Growth Theory give a
more complete picture of technological change than either can give on its own. . .
The key theoretical observation is that larger markets and larger stocks of
resources create substantially bigger incentives for discovering new ways to use
the resources. This simple insight explains why the techniques of mass
production emerged in the United States during the first half of the 19th century
(Romer 1996, p. 1).
New Growth Theory leads us first to think differently about the role of history in shaping
economic growth. The increasing returns associated with knowledge produce "path
dependence": future options are constrained by past actions. New Growth Theory is also
broadly consistent with an evolutionary view of how the economy changes. This evolution,
moreover, happens not smoothly but in abrupt steps, as new ideas and new businesses replace
old ones in a process of creative destruction.
1. Increasing Returns Produce Path Dependence
The New Growth Theory emphasizes the importance of increasing returns to the overall
opportunities for economic growth. Increasing returns imply tremendous opportunities for
growth, and the need for policy to deal with resulting monopolies and market imperfections. But
increasing returns have important implications for the process of development as well. An
economy dominated by increasing returns will develop very differently than and economy
characterized primarily by diminishing returns.
Economists have only recently begun to systematically explore the developmental implications
of increasing returns. One of the most interesting examples of path dependence is literally right
at our fingertips. Almost every computer keyboard in the western world follows one cryptic
arrangement in use for more than a century, with the letters QWERTY in the upper left-hand
corner. This design dates to the 1870s, and was chosen to prevent the long levers that pressed
the type against the ribbon from clashing with one another, and so, it is said, that a salesman
could type the word “typewriter” using only the keys on the top row.
The reasons behind the persistence of the typewriter keyboard tell us much about the
development of technology, argues historian Paul David. Three characteristics of QWERTY and
10
similar technologies produce this sort of lock-in: technical interrelatedness, economies of scale,
and quasi-irreversibility (David 1985). Technical interrelatedness is the complementarity
between the physical arrangement of the typewriter keyboard and the typist’s human capital of
touch-typing. Both the keyboard and the typist have to standardize on the same arrangement of
keys in order to achieve efficiency. Economies of scale refer to the relationship between the
number of users of a particular technology and the incentives facing new adopters. In the case of
QWERTY, early touch typists chose to be trained on what was initially the most common
keyboard arrangement. Similarly, typewriter manufacturers looked to produce models that could
be used by the largest number of trained typists. While early on there were several competing
arrangements for keyboards, by the mid-1890s, QWERTY had become virtually universal. That
this situation persisted—for more than a century now, in spite of the transition to an entirely new
technology, computers—is a product of the quasi-irreversibility of the investments by
manufacturers and touch typists. While manufacturers could easily change the layout of the
computer keyboard (and even end users can now do so by software), and keyboard users can
retrain themselves in a new layout, no one does because all the other keyboards and computer
users in the world have standardized on the QWERTY design.
The presence of "QWERTYnomics" has been noted in a wide variety of other technologies. The
triumph of VHS standard video recorders over what many regarded as a technically superior
Beta technology clearly followed the increasing returns dynamic: a small lead in market share
prompted broader availability of products on VHS and further increased demand for VHS
recorders. Eventually VHS drove Beta from the market.
QWERTYnomics implies path dependence: where economies end up is a product of the
development path that they follow. Small chance events occurring at the right time can have
persistent long-term effects. Economies can lock-in to particular, often inefficient, technologies
or other arrangements, and market forces will not automatically correct these inefficient
outcomes (Arthur 1987).
Increasing returns are becoming more important to the economy and economic theory because of
technological change. In the 19th century, the most important industries, like manufacturing and
agriculture, were characterized by decreasing returns. As agriculture expanded, it would move
on to less productive land and confront rising costs or diminishing demand for its product. In
contrast, many of the technologies of the twentieth century are characterized by increasing
returns: huge initial costs to create knowledge needed to produce the first product, but much
smaller costs for each additional unit of output. The economics of producing jet airliners and
computer software seems to follow these trends. Because of declining costs and technological
lock-in, firms that gain early market share in an emerging technology can gain virtual
monopolistic control of a market. Arthur notes that exactly this phenomenon occurred in the
computer industry, where after getting an initial lead thanks to its adoption by IBM (for the first
PC), the DOS operating system came to dominate personal computing. The lock in of users and
computer makers to DOS enabled Microsoft to earn huge profits (Arthur 1996). This argument
underlies a key portion of the anti-trust case brought by the federal government against Microsoft
(Cassidy 1998).
Notwithstanding the intuitively appealing examples, some economists are skeptical of the
importance and extent of increasing returns. While they concede that there are many network
11
effects, some question whether these are really externalities that distort market outcomes
(Liebowitz and Margolis 1994). Critics question how important technological lock-in is in
causing the economy to deviate in a major way from an optimal state. Advocates of
QWERTYnomics argue that the entire framework of economic progress is driven subtly and
pervasively by chance, and that conventional economic theory focuses primarily on a static view
of the world that, by its nature, obscures the effect of these processes (David 1997).
While much of the debate about QWERTYnomics has revolved around issues of technology, the
theory can be applied to industrial location. Because of the complementarities between
producers and suppliers and employers and workers, firms in a single industry may find it
advantageous to be located in the same community. Once a particular location is established as a
center for a particular industry, new firms and new workers have powerful incentives to locate
there. Paul Krugman has used this notion to build several sophisticated models of industrial
location. The same concept has applicability to international trade as well; industries that exhibit
increasing returns may not simply be dominated by one company or one city, but by a single
nation as well (Krugman 1991). (We explore the connection between lock-in and industrial
location more full in Part C of this section).
What are the policy implications of QWERTYnomics? Because small historical events can play
a decisive role in the development of technology or the location of industry, it is possible that
government interventions can produce a potentially better set of outcomes than the market alone.
For example, policies to support an emerging industry can create a self-reinforcing cycle that
leads to the development of enduring competitive advantage in that industry (Krugman 1994). In
thinking about technological development, it may be wise for public policy to discourage
markets from prematurely locking in to a particular technology before its costs and the
implications for further development are understood (David 1997). And while it is certainly
theoretically possible that governments might make better choices than the market, economists
are almost universally skeptical that they will do so.
2. Economies Exhibit Evolutionary Tendencies
The economy is an evolutionary system, not a Newtonian balance that always seeks equilibrium.
Both the micro behavior of economic actors (firms, workers and consumers) and the overall path
of economic development can be pictured by invoking analogies to biological evolution.
Individual actors don’t maximize their utility in ceaseless calculations of alternatives; they
muddle along, relying on previously successful behaviors until they are proven unsuccessful, and
then trying alternatives that draw from their own experience. The result, when multiplied over
the scale of the entire economy, is an economic system that evolves.
The science of economics arose, hand in hand, with the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Adam Smith, wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776. One of the dominant scientific
paradigms of that day was Newtonian physics—the notion that natural systems, ranging from the
infinitesimal to the cosmic, could be imagined as a series of elaborate balances always tending
toward equilibrium. Arguably the models and metaphors of 18th century physics were imprinted
on the great economic thinkers of that time, and were reflected in the vision that economists had
of the system they sought to explain.
12
Many economists have sought to add an evolutionary component to economic theory. More than
a century ago, Thorstein Veblen asked why economics—a discipline that analyzes the behavior
of biological actors (humans)—was not an evolutionary science (1898). While his models
emphasized the mechanics of the economy, even Alfred Marshall saw that the ultimate objective
or “Mecca” as he described it for economics, was to model the economy as an evolutionary
system (Marshall quoted in Nelson 1995).
The most prominent advocates of the evolutionary view of economic change are Richard Nelson
and Sidney Winter. Their 1984 book, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, posed a
new view of economics. Nelson and Winter’s evolutionary theory departs from the neoclassical
approach by noting that firms are now just profit maximizers and that the economy is not always
in equilibrium (Nelson 1981). The evolutionary model sees firms as wanting to maximize
profits, but being constrained in doing so by the limits of what they know and by the habits they
have acquired from their previous experience, what Nelson and Winter call organizational
inertia.
Nelson and Winter do not assume that economic actors have perfect information and that they
always make rational, profit-maximizing decisions. Instead, they suggest that economic actors,
particularly business firms and their managers, are creatures of routine. They formulate and
follow certain beliefs and behaviors, and pursue them as long as they continue to be successful.
Businesses change their routines only when they fail to work (and some do not change them at
all, and go out of existence).
As firms revise their routines, they undertake search processes to find or develop new routines.
Typically, these search processes are not the open-ended profit maximizing envisioned by
classical economic theory. Businesses are constrained in their search for new routines and most
often look for new routines that are similar to the ones that they have already adopted. Finally,
the economy functions as a selection environment. Over time it selects successful routines and
marginalizes or eliminates less successful ones, in the same way biological environments select
successful species.
In this evolutionary view routines are the equivalent of the economy’s genetic material. Over
time the economy selects businesses that have DNA that is well adapted to the existing business
environment; routines that don’t lead to successful behavior are eliminated from the gene pool.
Continuing the analogy, though, evolutionary economics is Lamarckian, in that the environment
can produce changes in businesses routines, which may in turn be passed on to successor
businesses.
Thus, unlike the neoclassical theory, which has a difficult time explaining technological change,
evolutionary theory deals with it explicitly. Firms start out with a set of routines, they explore
variations in those routines, and their choices of new routines are shaped by past experience and
their current competitive environment.
In the view of the evolutionary economists, change isn't the smooth and continuous adjustment at
the margin, but is rather the abrupt and often uneven displacement of the one technology by
another. Economic growth is a dis-equilibrium process, and as the competitive environment
changes, development and improvement of new techniques and changes in markets cause some
13
firms to grow and others to shrink. Economies move ahead by successively generating new
experiments and trials. A critical policy implication of this work is that encouraging
experimentation and learning is essential to economic progress. A corollary is that a diversity of
firms and institutions helps encourage and sustain experimentation (Nelson and Winter 1982).
Such evolutionary theory is closely related to path dependence. As Arthur points out, the non-
linear qualities of increasing returns models of the economy have distinct parallels to the
evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium (Arthur 1989). Because development is path
dependent and the future cannot be predicted with any precision, business managers will have to
emphasize adaptive behavior rather than optimization (Arthur 1996).
3. Creative Destruction is an Intrinsic Part Of Economic Progress
The conventional view of economics, crystallized by Alfred Marshall in the late 19th century was
of the economy as a well-balanced system, always tending toward equilibrium. All of the forces
acting on the economy generated signals or reactions that tended, over time, to push the economy
toward an optimal state. A shortage of some particular good or service was associated with a rise
in its price, which in turn called forth additional resources to produce it, ultimately triggering a
greater supply and a reduction in its price. The view of economic change afforded by this model
of the economy is one of smooth and continuous adjustment.
This view was challenged by Joseph Schumpeter, who argued that economic change was almost
exactly the opposite: abrupt and discontinuous, rather than smooth and orderly. Schumpeter
proposed that the search for higher than normal profits (quasi-rents, in economic jargon) led
individuals and firms to innovate, to seek unique new practices and technologies. New products,
almost by definition, give the businesses producing them a monopoly, if only a temporary one,
and enable firms to earn higher profits until their product is successfully imitated by a competitor
or displaced from the market by yet another new product. New businesses, with new ideas,
changing the definition of markets, not simply lowering the price of some commodity, are the
driving force behind change.
In this view, economic change is not the result of slow movement from one equilibrium to
another, but is driven by the pursuit of the quasi-monopolistic profits that accrue to innovators.
Economic change is propelled by the succession of technologies and practices that destroy old,
inefficient arrangements as newer more efficient ones are created. New ideas are frequently
created by new firms: the business that builds the first railroad is seldom the business that
previously operated the stagecoaches (Schumpeter 1934). New businesses develop new ideas
that displace the old ones. The result is what Schumpeter calls “creative destruction.”
Paul Romer echoes Schumpeter’s argument about the disruptions inherent in economic progress.
We achieve higher productivity by instituting new processes, procedures and organizations that
invariably displace old ones. The displacement produces real losses to those whose jobs or
investments were tied to old ways of doing things, but absent this creative destruction, there is no
technological improvement. Romer offers a metaphor drawn from physical training. Swimmers
work to improve their speed by a combination of physical training and modifications to their
technique. Using any given technique, once a swimmer has achieved a high level of physical
conditioning, it is no longer possible to generate improvements in performance. The only option
14
is to modify the technique. But modifying a technique almost always produces a short-term
decline in performance as the swimmer struggles to become as precise and effective with the
new stroke as she was with the old (Romer 1994a).
Romer maintains the same tradeoff—short-term dislocation to learn techniques that are
ultimately more efficient “no pain, no gain”—applies with equal force to the economy.
Rearranging the economy to produce new goods or services, means some of the firms, workers,
and equipment used in the current production will be displaced.
Most of Romer’s work focuses on the long run: how much economies grow over periods
measured in years, not the quarter to quarter fluctuations that get media attention. But New
Growth Theory also has important implications for how we view business cycles. Recessions
are in large part a period of time in which the job losses caused by destruction of the old are
concentrated, and for that time exceed the job gains from the ongoing creation of the new.
Schumpeter and his fellow Austrian economists maintained this view of the need to tolerate,
even welcome dislocations, even in the face of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their view
was that the depression was a natural, even beneficial process of change that shouldn’t be
interfered with, and that if it was, future efficiency would suffer. Romer has made a similar
argument about recessions: layoffs and downsizing in recessions represents, in part, a clustering
of the job destruction occurs when the vulnerabilities of technologically weak firms are exposed
by declining markets (Romer 1994a).
The economy is in a continuous state of upheaval, with new businesses being created, existing
businesses expanding (and contracting) and other firms failing. While this occurs even in good
times, there is evidence that the process of failure and contraction is even more pronounced in
recessions (Davis, et al. 1996). In Romer’s view, much of this job destruction is part of the
natural process of replacing outmoded technologies. Businesses that are marginalized by
technological change may continue to function in good economic times, but are too weak to
weather recessions, resulting in increased rates of layoffs and business closures.
While he was skeptical of those who argued that we would run short of the new ideas needed to
advance the economy, in his later work Schumpeter became pessimistic about long-term
prospects for growth. He feared that gradually capitalism would sow the seeds of its own
destruction, as the rising scale of business replaced entrepreneurs with bureaucrats, diminishing
the social support for innovation. Over time, he feared, established firms and industries would
use their size and political power to win subsidies and regulations discouraging change,
undercutting the incentives and opportunities for new entrepreneurs to unleash further gales of
creative destruction (Schumpeter 1942). The surging growth of venture capital, and the rapid
ascendance of new, technology driven corporations—the Microsofts, Intels, Amazons, Cisco
Systems and thousands of dot.coms—seems however to vindicate Schumpeter’s original
optimistic views about the dynamism of entrepreneurs.
Creative destruction has a straightforward policy implication. Efforts to maintain the current
arrangements of firms, markets and technologies may have the effect of retarding the
development of more efficient and sustainable activities. Places seeking economic development
need to assure that they are good locations for the development of new ideas, and often the
15
formation of new firms, if they are to be able to succeed in an increasingly global, knowledge-
based economy.
B. Institutions Matter
The problem with the classical description of laissez-faire is its suggestion that the
best of all possible arrangements for economic affairs has already been discovered
and that it requires no collective action. The lesson from economic growth is that
collective action is very important, and that everything, including institutions, can
always be improved (Romer 1993b, p. 388).
The most important job for economic policy is to create an institutional
environment that supports technological change (Romer 1994a, p. 21).
Are governments obstacles to economic growth or instigators of growth? Is the government that
best befits the economy one that gradually withers away, or a strong one? Much economic
theory gives the impression that governments are needed only when markets won’t work, to
address market failures, or provide public goods like national defense, and to achieve purely
social aims, like taking care of the poor and elderly. Governments that do more than the
minimum, the conventional wisdom goes, sap the economy of its strength. New Growth Theory
gives us a new view of the role of institutions in creating the necessary conditions for growth in
an economy driven by new knowledge.
What are institutions and why should they matter? If we think of the economy as a game,
institutions are the rules of the game and the processes by which rules are determined and
enforced. Formal rules, like constitutions, statutes and regulations, and governmental bodies,
like courts and legislators, are institutions. So too, are informal rules that shape and limit
transactions, like common business practices, cultural attitudes and values, and reputation, and
the social constructs that guide and enable interpersonal and business relations.
History influences the pace and trajectory of knowledge creation. But knowledge creation is not
purely the product of market forces. Non-market forces, particularly institutions can also
influence what kinds of knowledge are created. A number of economists have begun to consider
the role that different institutional arrangements play in economic development.
1. Institutions Shape the Incentives for the Creation Of New Knowledge
Economic historian Douglass North won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 for his work on
the role of institutions (broadly defined to include governments, culture, and a range of non-
market organizations) in shaping the prospects for economic growth. North observes that in all
of human history, successful, rapidly growing, wealth-creating economies have existed for only a
few centuries. The story of most of our civilizations (and most of the Third World today) is one
of social systems that only sporadically meet the basic needs of their populations, and which
regularly fail to generate sustained economic progress.
Traditional neoclassical economic analysis deals chiefly with the allocation of scarce resources
among competing ends at any point in time. How can societies most efficiently produce and
16
