Introduction: Demand, Complexity, and Long-Run Economic Evolution

Chad Baum () and Andreas Chai ()
Additional contact information
Andreas Chai: Griffith Business School, Griffith University

A chapter in Demand, Complexity, and Long-Run Economic Evolution, 2019, pp 1-13 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Over the past two centuries, the unprecedented expansion of consumer spending across advanced economies has been an essential driver of long run-economic growth, innovation, and prosperity. So essential in fact, that increases in consumer purchasing power are also frequently mentioned as a main reason for why long-run economic growth is inherently desirable: more growth offers consumers greater opportunity to better satisfy their needs and wants. At the same time, the underlying problems that consumers seek to satisfy are also fundamentally changing: as the overall share of spending dedicated to the satisfaction of basic needs has declined, more spending is inevitably dedicated to complex activities and domains in which consumers can exercise a higher degree of discretionary power. In these new domains, the information and social environment play a much greater role in shaping the orientation of consumer spending. These long run trends raise new questions, such as: Will levels of consumer spending continue to grow as they have recently? Can we expect consumer welfare to benefit from future consumption growth the same way that it has in the past? This considers the long-run evolution of consumption patterns alongside the social, behavioural, and technological forces that have shaped, and indeed motivated them. In doing so, this collection of chapters contributes to a better understanding of the structural changes to consumer demand that are currently taking place in advanced economies and their implications for how we understand and strive for economic growth and consumer welfare amidst.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
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:spr:eccchp:978-3-030-02423-9_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030024239

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-02423-9_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Economic Complexity and Evolution from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().