Welcome to Economic Growth#
This is a series of lecture notes and exercises on the topic of Economic Growth for Masters-level students.
Acknowledgement. These notes summarize and build on material found in:
Feel the earth beneath your feet. Some topics will utilize data analysis, visualization or model solutions and simulations using the programming language python. The goal here is to make the material more “alive”.
Don’t view from inside the tour bus window; walk the paths and climb the hills. Each topic is interspersed with exercises. The exercises are important pit stops that reinforce the main ideas presented. Readers are recommended to take these pit stops and wrestle with the exercises. The hope is that you return to the start of each topic with a more critical and deeper appreciation of the ideas.
A toe dip in the mud. Students are not expected to have learned python. It is nevertheless a hope that the material here may also pique the student’s interest into picking up some coding skills. Such skills are indispensible in this modern age of economic growth.
We will use these numerical tools on the computer merely as devices to aid our reading and understanding. As a by-product, we hope to also illustrate some of the toolkit of the modern economist; one that requires an interaction between economic theory, empirics and computational explorations.
Navigate using the table of contents.
Motivation
Tools I (ODEs)
Exogenous Growth I
Tools II (Optimal Control)
Exogenous Growth II
Endogenous Growth
References