The present paper is set out to examine the place of Geoff Harcourt's 1965 "Two-sector model of the distribution of income and the level of employment in the short run" in his research agenda, as well as its original historical context and fate. That pioneer model articulated how the production...

From its flow tide, fueled by the Cold War, to its ebbing with the anti-growth movement and the economic crises of the early 1970s, the "growthmen" of MIT stood at the center of the dominant field in macroeconomics. The history of MIT growth economics is traced from Solow's seminal neoclassical...

The paper investigates Evsey's Domar's introduction of the rate of growth as a variable in economics in the 1940s and 1950s . Domar investigated the nature of what he called the "moving equilibrium" of ec onomic processes with infinite duration. Reactions to Domar' s approach at the time brought...

The origins of "capital fundamentalism' – the notion that physical capital accumulation is the primary determinant of economic growth – have been often ascribed to H arrod's and Domar's proposition that the rate of growth is the product of the saving rate and of the outpu t - capital ratio....

Knut Wicksell's concept of the natural (or neutral) rate of interest, introduced between the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, has played an important role in modern monetary macroeconomics, especially after the development of inflation targeting policy in the 1990s. More...

In the 1960s and 1970s Harrod shifted the emphasis of his research in economic dynamics from the study of business cycles (instability principle) to the investigation of the growth process. As part of that, he restated his concept of the natural growth rate as an optimum welfare rate. The...

The theory of economic development was an exception to Paul Samuelson's claim of being a "generalist" in economics. It was a hard subject to tackle analytically because of the intrinsic difficulty of some of the concepts involved, such as increasing returns and long-term economic evolution....