Population growth and industrialization

Haiwen Zhou

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper formalizes Rostow’s insight of the role of a leading sector in industrialization in a general equilibrium model. Population growth may lead to a shortage of food and a breakdown of the industrialization process. However, population growth may benefit the manufacturing sector in the adoption of increasing returns to scale technologies. Elasticity of demand for agricultural goods plays an important role in determining whether an improvement of agricultural technology or an increase of population is beneficial to the manufacturing sector. A comparison of China and Britain before the Industrial Revolution shows that R&D is necessary for sustained growth. Achieving industrialization independently requires a combination of a sufficient market size from the demand side and a sufficient supply of technologies from the supply side.

Keywords: Population growth; increasing returns to scale; industrialization; leading sector; Malthus population cycle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E10 N10 O14 Q01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-01-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Economic Inquiry 2.47(2009): pp. 249-265

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Related works:
Journal Article: POPULATION GROWTH AND INDUSTRIALIZATION (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:91449

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