Abstract
This paper provides a theoretical investigation of possible sources of long-run economic growth in the future. Historically, in the industrial era and during the ongoing digital revolution (which began approximately in the 1980s) the main engine of global economic growth has been research and development (R&D), translating into systematic labor-augmenting technological progress and trend growth in labor productivity. If in the future all essential production or R&D tasks will eventually be subject to automation, though, the engine of growth will be shifted to the accumulation of programmable hardware (capital), and R&D will lose its prominence. Economic growth will then accelerate, no longer constrained by the scarce human input. By contrast, if some essential production and R&D tasks will never be fully automatable, then R&D may forever remain the main growth engine, and the human input may forever remain the scarce, limiting factor of global growth. Additional studied mechanisms include the accumulation of R&D capital and hardware-augmenting technical change.
Funding source: Narodowe Centrum Nauki
Award Identifier / Grant number: 2017/27/B/HS4/00189
Acknowledgement
I thank an anonymous Reviewer for valuable comments and suggestions which helped substantially improve the paper. All errors are my responsibility.
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Author contribution: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
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Research funding: Funding from National Science Center (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) under grant OPUS 14 No. 2017/27/B/HS4/00189 is gratefully acknowledged.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- On determination of the number of factors in an approximate factor model
- Clean energy consumption and economic growth in China: a time-varying analysis
- Panel data models with two threshold variables
- What will drive global economic growth in the digital age?
- On the nonlinear relationships between shadow economy and the three pillars of sustainable development: new evidence from panel threshold analysis
- Tail behaviours of multiple-regime threshold AR models with heavy-tailed innovations
- Stock price prediction using multi-scale nonlinear ensemble of deep learning and evolutionary weighted support vector regression