Agricultural revolution and industrialization

Angus Chu, Pietro Peretto and Xilin Wang

Journal of Development Economics, 2022, vol. 158, issue C

Abstract: This study explores how agricultural technology affects the endogenous takeoff of an economy in the Schumpeterian growth model. Due to the subsistence requirement for agricultural consumption, an improvement in agricultural technology reallocates labor from agriculture to the industrial sector. Therefore, agricultural improvement expands firm size in the industrial sector, which determines innovation and triggers an endogenous transition from stagnation to growth. Calibrating the model to data, we find that without the reallocation of labor from agriculture to the industrial sector in the early 19th century, the takeoff of the US economy would have been delayed by about four decades.

Keywords: Agricultural technology; Endogenous takeoff; Innovation; Economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O30 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387822000529
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Agricultural Revolution and Industrialization (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:158:y:2022:i:c:s0304387822000529

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.102887

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().