Possible Tests of the Results of Integration

This chapter will focus instead on how to test the various insights regarding economic growth derived in the preceding chapters. The analysis of preceding chapters has been pursued primarily along different causal links – but with attention as necessary to emergent properties. The book has not created some overarching grand theory or model, and has indeed argued that such an outcome is unlikely and probably undesirable. The results must thus for the most part be tested in pieces rather than in their entirety. One of the key arguments of chapter 3 was that each theory surveyed has an as-yet-poorly-identified range of applicability. That is, each theory sheds useful light on some aspects of the economic growth process but not on others. Yet the scholarly urge toward over-generalization has meant that theories are often judged to be everywhere right or everywhere wrong. Theories should instead be tested in a very context-specific manner: does the particular theory shed light on a particular causal link?