Changes in social structures occurring during the process of economic growth can be considered direct consequences of this process, while other changes are caused by factors such as technological progress, that affect simultaneously social structures and growth. This chapter focuses on that part...

What are the long-run effects of permanent changes to the economy? We characterize long-run comparative statics for a broad class of models in terms of expenditure shares, substitution elasticities, and capital supply elasticities. Our key insight is that long-run analysis can be performed using...

Over 250,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since the mid-1990s. Studies – both case studies of states and at the individual-level - attribute these deaths to credit crunches in the agrarian sector and increased debt burden among farmers. Most of the farm suicides have, however, taken...

Cross-country labor productivity differences are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. We propose a new explanation for these patterns in which the self-selection of heterogeneous workers determines sector productivity. We formalize our theory in a general-equilibrium Roy model in which...

This research examines the climatic origins of the diffusion of Neolithic agriculture across countries and archaeological sites. The theory suggests that a foraging society s history of climatic shocks shaped the timing of its adoption of farming. Specifically, as long as climatic disturbances...

The paper examines long-term strategies of capital modernization under different assumptions about embodied technological change, energy regulation, and substitutability between energy and capital. To describe modernization of physical capital, the authors use a vintage capital model with the...

This paper proposes a transparent and robust measurement of sustainable human development for developing economies. We focus in particular on small island developing states [SIDS] which appear to be highly vulnerable in both economic and environmental dimensions. Hence, our contribution is...

In this paper we examine the role played by environmental externalities in shaping the dynamics of an economy with two sectors (a farming sector and an industrial one), free inter-sectoral labor mobility and heterogeneous agents (workers/farmers and industrial entrepreneurs). We find that, in...

The link between energy consumption and economic growth has been widely studied in the economic literature. Understanding this relationship is important from both an environmental and a socio-economic point of view, as energy consumption is crucial to economic activity and human environmental...

The multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM) approach makes it possible to perform a check on the feasibility and desirability of patterns of metabolism of socio-economic systems by providing a characterization at different levels and scales of: (a) the...