Economic Growth Without Accumulation or Technical Change: Agriculture Before Mechanization

Underlying much of Joan Robinson’s work, particularly in the later years of her life, was the aim of explaining the process of economic growth. She considered that the theory of allocation of resources with given endowments and technology was largely vacuous and that ‘a dynamic long-run analysis of how resources can be increased is now what we require’ (Robinson, 1962, p. 100). In formulating such a theory of growth both she and her opponents in the neoclassical camp agreed that the major sources of growth of output per head had to be accumulation and technical progress. Their disagreement was about the effects and the determinants of accumulation, and the causes and character of technical progress. Very little progress, however, has been made in explaining economic development by either the Cambridge or the neoclassical schools. The causes of the poverty of nations remain as obscure as they were when Joan Robinson called for a rediscovery of the problem of economic growth in the 1950s, despite the enormous intellectual energy devoted to the problem since then. In the 1980s most intellectual effort in economics is once again being devoted to static allocation problems of an even more obscure variety than Robinson decried.