Customer Reviews

Economic Growth (2nd Edition)

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Professor Weil has provided a very readable text for the senior or graduate student. His organization is excellent, as he steps logically through a description and analysis of the main drivers of economic growth. There is just enough math to display the Cobb-Douglas and Solow models and how they help understand economic growth. Additional appendices with mathematical proofs. Topics covered include physical and human capital formation, productivity, share of a nation's resources devoted to investment, population, technology and institutional elements. A most enjoyable read - I recommend it.

This is a fascinating book, and that is an amazing achievement for a textbook. The approach David Weil takes to this very important subject allows the reader to get involved in the subject, understand why the easy conceptions we have about this subject are indeed too simple and why they are too simple, and develop some intuitions and models with somewhat greater understanding. It is written for a general reader or student with only a very basic understanding of economics (micro and/or macro). Not much math is required to read the chapters (very little, actually), and the discussions with more math are put in appendices for each chapter. So, if you want the math, it is there, but if it scares you - well, you can read the text of the chapter and skip over the appendices.

The overall approach is to provide an introduction to the topic, build some tools and approaches to the problems of economic growth through a series of important topics and then synthesize all of it in the concluding chapter. Weil provides seventeen chapters that are grouped into five parts. However, there are really three big sections to the book. The first section is Part I and the first two chapters that provide an introduction to the issues of economic growth and a basic framework for the discussion. The third broad section is Part V, the last chapter, that provides the conclusion to the book by summarizing all that has been discussed in the book. The second section makes up the bulk of the book and is comprised of Parts II, III, and IV.

Part II discusses the issues of Factor Accumulation. These are the problems around physical capital (not just money, but the tools of the economy as well), population issues, and human capital.

Part III examines productivity. Those of us who are not well versed in this topic have no idea how subtle and interesting this subject is. Just defining and measuring it are not easy, but then going after what the real order of causality is turns out to be far from obvious. That is one of the great things Weil does in this book, he shows us over and over again that the simple assumptions one might make about what causes what is not as obvious as we might have assumed. However, he doesn't leave us in a state of confusion. He shows us how to tease out some knowledge and to frame questions for future investigation (both in later chapters and for future research).

Part IV deals with issues of government involvement in the economy, income inequality, culture, geography, and resources. In each of these discussions it is a matter of degree and what choices a society makes in seeking its desires. What costs is it willing to bear? Rapid growth and resource exploitation might cost some environmental degradation. Importing resources from other places might have a limit as world population soars to ... what point? Culture tends to change as societies become rich and subsequent generations throw off some of the values of those that provided the riches. What is the effect of that change in work habit and moral behavior?

The book also has interesting articles in each chapter that are shaded in blue and provide very interesting insight into the topic under discussion. And since it is a textbook, there are questions, vocabulary, and such at the end of each chapter. There is also an extended resource list, a very helpful glossary, and an index. The book also points you to a website with very helpful resources.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in this topic. It is written so well that a motivated general reader will have no problems with it and students will have a much better experience with it than most of the textbooks produced nowadays.

Fine read and a great text!

"Economic growth" continues to be of interest largely because of the large part of humanity whose living standards are so very substantially worse than the middle-class norm of OECD countries. Economists are as interested as anyone else, whence university texts full of economists' economic growth research:

-- Acemoglu, "Introduction to Modern Economic Growth" (2009)
-- Aghion and Howitt, "The Economics of Growth" (2009)
-- Weil, "Economic Growth" (2nd ed., 2009)

As a Ph.D. economist who has resided and worked for the past thirty years in low-income areas of several continents, in countries of which the wealthiest was Egypt, "Economic Growth" is a daily interest. How does the enterprise sector relate to what attracts our attention to low-income countries in the first place: hunger, physical insecurity, abusive social relations? Does it pass these problems by, or does it alleviate them? Should interested outsiders care about "the economy" and if so what should they do? Or should they concentrate on relief, or on political reform?

This review of the three texts listed above looks at them from the point of view of their usefulness in relation to this particular interest.

Although Weil's undergraduate text stays away from the mathematics that dominate the other two, all three books are quite similar in that each is an encyclopedic exposition of models of aggregate growth, along with numerous factors that have been suggested to affect it. None is a monograph that states and defends a thesis. They all prepare a student to grapple with problems in the hope that the students will solve them.

Perhaps that is the fate of a textbook: anything more assertive would be commercially limiting.

Nonetheless, the result is a certain defensiveness. The task of the two graduate texts in particular seems to be to demonstrate that, if observation of low-income countries or of growth should give rise to an idea, then the economics profession can model it.

This is not to say that the authors haven't had ideas. But none of these texts is a handbook of things to be done: how to create economic growth or improve its quality. The implication, unfortunately, is that the authors don't have that toolkit to offer. (The graduate texts are, however, handbooks on how to model.)

The reader will learn quite a bit about the world from Weil's book, which is more descriptive than the other two. Aghion and Howitt's is immensely learned, but Acemoglu's book stands out in a couple ways. First, it is the only one to cross the line and become an applied mathematics textbook pure and simple. Secondly, however, its great length affords space for an "Epilogue," an explicit outlier that contains some non-mathematical statements. And it's here where I can pin-point what seems to me to be the underlying methodological limitation.

Acemoglu says about Chinese history, on page 867 (!): "When prospects for economic growth conflicted with political stability, the elite opted for maintaining stability, even if this came at the expense of potential economic growth. Thus China tightly controlled ... ."

Let me state the principle that is illustrated here but that Acemoglu has perhaps overlooked: Things don't happen for causes. Things happen because people do them.

If things happened for causes, then we might indeed model cause and effect -- and probably conclude that that's all we could do.

But all the models and history are after the fact. If the fact were different, we'd be modeling that instead. And it always might have been different. China's history, in point of fact, finally did read: "Even though the measures required for economic growth conflicted with political stability, the elite found a way to take the measures and preserve political structures, resulting in massive benefits that ultimately were both economic and political." China's elite might very well have done this at any time; it's not for us to say that they couldn't have.

Acemoglu overlooked this principle of action in the section on pp. 868-70 about Western Europe's growth after 1800. He says that two things were different in the pre-1800 period: no systematic investment in human capital, and the presence of "authoritarian" political regimes. But he then ignores investment in human capital in his story of the post-1800 period.

This is a fatal error. People make the political institutions what they are, make the families what they are, and make the firms what they are. "Things happen because people do them."

People who bring about change do not drop from outer space; they "distill their frenzy" from somewhere, and it's usually from an intellectual outlook they encountered in schools and universities.

If we hope low-income countries' enterprises will become more world class, their owners and managers must have this as their vision. If we hope that international standards of human rights will prevail, then social leaders must have that as their vision. And if we hope that Total Factor Productivity will rise in low-income countries, it is people who will make that happen.

It is actually a bit odd that all three texts should tell the basic story whose thread runs through savings, capital accumulation, TFP, and innovation without tackling what Acemoglu calls (p. 873) "the industrial organization of innovation." I give Acemoglu credit for this excellent term.

Surely the industrial organization of innovation would include universities investing in human capital, but perhaps this kind of investment will have to have happened more widely in low-income countries before it's modeled.

I conclude by reiterating that each of these three texts is encyclopedic and extremely impressive.

This is a marvellous book. eminently didactic, up-to-date and very well structured. I finished a graduate degree in economics ober 25 years ago and wanted to go over some book/articles on the theory of economic growth, most of which I had forgotten. This book certainly fit the bill.
The author begins with a heuristic structure which describes in stylized form the problem of economic growth: why some countries grow more than others, and why income per capita is higher in some countries. He then explains the Cobb-Douglas production function and the Solow model in stylized form, and applies these one-by-one to each of the factors which influence differences in growth: capital, labor, productivity, etc. He devotes a significant portion of the text to the theme of productivity, and one or two chapters to the influence of technology on growth, a theme which has much relevance in the modern economic context.
The required mathematics is included, but is kept to a minimum, so that the book is not cluttered with lenghty, but unnecessary proofs. These are left to appendices in the text and on the website which is included with the book. The formulae ( about two or three pages per chapter ) clarify in mathematical notation many pages of explanation in the text, and are well developed. However, the author provides many vignettes with concrete examples, and much of the text draws from factual economic history. He also uses scattergrams to explain relations between economic variables rather than regression equations, which make the text easier to swallow.
A very well-rounded text, highly readable, yet with sufficient rigor, with lots of exercises and problems to be solved for those interested in applying it in a classroom or course. For those interested in the subject of economic growth, whether student or professional, it would be hard to find a better book.

I use this as a reference book for work even though I didn't use this text in school. It has been very useful and explains the concepts easily with illusrations and analysis that can be applied to work arguments.

It came withing the time they said. And the book was in pretty good condition with some high lights. Thanks.

The book was in great condition, as listen on amazon, and didnt take too long to arrive through mail.

I have not bought this book b/c it is too expensive. However, how could any professor assign a book which costs $120 to students? The book may well be decent, but no self-respecting professor would make their students shell out that much money for a textbook...

Shame on any professor who does.