L’intégration des ressources naturelles dans la modélisation macroéconomique: l’empreinte de Robert M. Solow

Marion Gaspard and Antoine Missemer

Revue française d'économie, 2022, vol. Volume XXXVII, issue 3, 147-184

Abstract: In the 1970s, the oil crisis and the Meadows report [1972] forced neoclassical economists to react to warnings about the limits to growth and to question the role of (exhaustible) natural resources in production processes. Quickly, they denounced apocalyptic scenarios, emphasizing adjustment mechanisms such as price variations and technical and institutional transformations. This article analyzes the theoretical and institutional role played by Robert M. Solow and some of his collaborators Joseph E. Stiglitz, William D. Nordhaus) in the reconfiguration of macroeconomics. It appears that Solow occupied the field, in a context of internal struggles at MIT, inviting his former students to restore the legitimacy of economists, event if it meant bringing the debates to technical issues – the form of production functions – rather than paradigmatic ones. While most of the criticisms addressed today to the work conducted at the time concern these technical questions (factor substitution, backstop technology, confidence in markets for price adjustment), this article shows that other biases, such as the desirability of growth or the translation of any environmental issue into an investment decision, deserve to be questioned. The history of the integration of natural resources into macroeconomic modeling thus appears richer than is usually claimed.

Date: 2022
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