THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF ECONOMIC GROWTH（古典经济增长理论）.pdf

THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF ECONOMIC GROWTH Donald J. Harris Professor of Economics, Emeritus Stanford University © February 20, 2007 Forthcoming in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, London: Macmillan, 2007. THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF ECONOMIC GROWTH Donald J. Harris Abstract Focused on the emerging conditions of industrial capitalism in Britain in their own time, the classical economists were able to provide an account of the broad forces that influence economic growth and of the mechanisms underlying the growth process. Accumulation and productive investment of a part of the social surplus in the form of profits were seen as the main driving force. Hence, changes in the rate of profit were a decisive reference point for analysis of the long-term evolution of the economy. As worked out most coherently by Ricardo, the analysis indicated that in a closed economy there is an inevitable tendency for the rate of profit to fall. In this article, the essential features of the classical analysis of the accumulation process are presented and formalized in terms of a simple model. Classical Perspectives on Growth Analysis of the process of economic growth was a central feature of the work of the English classical economists, as represented chiefly by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Despite the speculations of others before them, they must be regarded as the main precursors of modern growth theory. The ideas of this school reached their highest level of development in the works of Ricardo. The interest of these economists in problems of economic growth was rooted in the concrete conditions of their time. Specifically, they were confronted with the facts of economic and social changes taking place in contemporary English s