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Production was at the heart of economics from the days of Classical economics. However, with the rise of Neoclassical economics in the late 19th century, production has lost its status as the ultimate interest of economics. Several opportunities for fruitful integration of alternative streams of economics research—Evolutionary, Structuralist and Keynesian in particular—have been also missed. Even the humanist approaches to development, such as Sen's Human Capability Approach, paid little attention to the domain of production. In this article, we argue that the fragmentation of the production-centred paradigm has weakened both academic research and policy-making related to economic development. We introduce and discuss eight articles developed around the special issue theme of Bringing Production Back into Development. We argue that a renewed 'productionist' agenda is essential to address the structural challenges faced by developing countries, even more so after the revelation of structural weaknesses by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of the firm has been dominated by a neoclassical apparatus that abstracts from most real-life features familiar to managers. Yet the economy can often be characterized by certain regularities of behavior, both over time and cross-sectionally Rejection of fully optimizing behavior as an explanation of economic activity does not single out any precise alternative as a theory of boundedly rational behavior This paper develops an evolutionary model describing the relation between endogenous technological change and economic growth along the lines of an 'artificial world' modeling philosophy. In this model firms must determine what proportion of their investment budget will be devoted to R&D as an operating routine. In contrast to the more neoclassical approaches the paper investigates this decision problem in the context of bounded rationality where agents can have only vague ideas about the relationship between their actions and outcomes. The model is constructed around three basic blocks. The first block describes how the artificial economy evolves with a given set of technologies and firms, with selection taking place at both levels. This block consists of equations for the rate of capital accumulation, the diffusion of new technologies in the total capital stock of the firms and the real wage rate. The second block describes a set of rules that is used to introduce new technologies and firms into the economy. This block takes the innovative behavior of firms as given and then describes the probability that individual firms will make an innovation as well as how this innovation is introduced. The third block describes how innovative behavior changes under the influence of the evolution of the economy and firm learning. This block describes feedback from performance to innovative behavior and thus a form of collective learning. The paper concludes that an evolutionary approach appears to offer an attractive alternative explanation of how an economy can 'bootstrap' itself in historical time through a succession of growth phases and market structures. The model also demonstrates that a bounded rationality approach to the theory of the firm, coupled with an evolutionary framework for analyzing market selection and collective behavior, does yield dividends both in terms of explaining how identifiable patterns of behavior emerge from profit-seeking rather than completely rational profit-maximizing assumptions and how market structures and growth regimes may be endogenized simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economics as a discipline is currently in disarray. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, academic experts, students, commentators, practitioners and politicians all questioned the status of academic economics and many called for a 'new economic thinking'. Nearly a decade later, however, there is little evidence of a transformation in research and teaching. The present study first clarifies what is meant by a transformation of economics as a discipline, since this remains an ill-defined term and may be interpreted in very different ways. It then establishes the conditions of a successful transformation of the discipline in terms of intra-disciplinary and extra-disciplinary factors. The paper argues that economics as a discipline cannot be expected to trigger this transformation by itself (i.e. via self-regulation), since the 'market for economic ideas' is prone to market failure. In addition, the influence of external factors and actors on the market may serve to distort the congruence between the individual researcher's utility and societal welfare. External incentives are therefore required to establish constitutional guardrails that ensure fair competition between ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ignorance and misunderstanding of Schumpeter's writing are the main reasons why the Anglo-American School, as dominant in the context of neoclassical economics, was and still is separate from the German Historical School. However, Schumpeter's arguments are relevant today because the system of general economic equilibrium has no adequate theory able to explain neither endogenous nor structural development proposed by Schumpeter. His theory of economic development can serve as a coherent response to Marxist theory. For Schumpeter, the intra-capitalist competition fully explains the structural changes in the economy. He argues that competition is a dynamic process of diff erences and struggles between companies, and not static competition as proposed by the Walrasian mathematical perfect model. Schumpeter argues that the theory of economic cycles and the growth theory are inseparable. Th e overarching aim of this paper is to through synthesize of theoretical analysis confirms the relevance of Schumpeter's theory in the context of the digital economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship between economic growth theory and developmental economics, particularly after economist Robert Solow's work on growth theory in 1956 and 1957 and in the formal analysis of economic development. The article examines the Solow growth model and how it applies to developing countries such as tropical countries. It is argued that the geographic scope of the Solow growth model was intended to include underdeveloped countries as well as developed countries. The article also discusses capital accumulation, economic models, and endogenous growth theory.

Presents information on a technical review received by The Wildlife Society (TWS) which addresses the issue of economic growth. Conflict between economic growth and wildlife conservation; Schools of thought formed in response to growing discontent with neoclassical economics; View of TWS on population.

In a number of recent papers attempts have been made to study problems of optimal economic growth without making the assumption that the welfare function being maximized is of the conventional additive separable form. With the usual neoclassical technology, however, one can work with a class of welfare functions satisfying some continuity, quasiconcavity and monotonicity properties, and derive a few general propositions about the existence of optimal programmes, and supporting efficiency prices, and about the relation between the input sequence generating optimal programmes and the golden rule. Since the results are quite independent of the assumption of additive separability which is admittedly rather restrictive, they are of sufficient economic interest to warrant a brief, systematic statement. Proofs of these propositions involve no major difficulty for those who are familiar with the literature on infinite dimensional commodity spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoclassical growth theory explains growth in terms of interactions between two basic types of factors such as technology and conventional inputs. At the next level, conventional inputs are subdivided into physical capital, labor, and human capital. The initial split into technology and conventional inputs is promising, because technology does differ from all other inputs. However, for technical reasons, neoclassical theory mapped this split onto the theoretical dichotomy between public and private goods. This means that the theory leads to a dead end when one tries to understand the details about technology in a second-stage analysis analogous to economist Richard Dawkins's investigation of the steam governor. Technology in the model does not correspond to anything in the world. It is possible to understand capital in terms of things like machine tools that can be observed, but for a description of technology, neoclassical theory only relates to things that live in models-shifting production possibility frontiers and the like. The obvious real-world candidates for technology simply are not public goods. For example, a promising line of work in the 1960's studied embodied technological change. Implicitly, it modeled technology as designs for machines. This line of work lost its momentum, perhaps because of the difficulty people had in reconciling what is known about machine design with an initial cut that makes technology a public good.

Neoclassical transitional dynamics are a central element of standard macroeconomic theory. Quantitative experiments with the fixed-savings-rate models of the 1960's showed lengthy transitions, thus potentially rationalizing sustained differences in growth rates across countries. We investigate quantitative transitional dynamics in various neoclassical models with intertemporally optimizing house-holds. Lengthy transitions occur only with very low intertemporal substitution. Generally, when one tries to explain sustained economic growth with transitional dynamics, there are extremely counterfactual implications. These result from the fact that implied marginal products are extraordinarily high in the early stages of development. (JEL E10, O10) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on stability and re-switching in two-sector models. In an economy with many commodities, the value of capital per man will depend on the price of machines, as well as the number of machines. This price will depend in part on the rate of interest, and hence the neo-classical theory rests on a circular argument. The model selected by critics of the neo-classical school is the two-sector model with fixed co-efficients. With a single technique, it is proved that the value of capital per man will rise as the rate of interest falls if and only if, the sector producing machines is more labour intensive than the sector producing consumables. This condition is also necessary and sufficient for stability in the two-sector fixed co-efficient model with a proportional savings function. Stability is usually discussed in terms of convergence of the warranted rate of growth towards the natural rate of growth. This, in turn, depends on the relationship between the warranted rate of growth and the rate of profit, and on the relationship between the rate of profit and the number of machines per worker.