What Will Drive Long-Run Growth in the Digital Age?

Jakub Growiec

No 2020-054, KAE Working Papers from Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of Economic Analysis

Abstract: This paper considers the prospective sources of long-run growth in the future. Historically, in the industrial era and at the early stage of the digital era (which began approximately in the 1980s) the main growth engine is R&D. If in the future all essential production or R&D tasks will eventually be subject to automation, though, the engine of growth will be shifted to the accumulation of programmable hardware (capital), and R&D will lose its prominence. By contrast, if neither production nor R&D tasks will be fully automated, R&D will remain the main growth engine. Additional mechanisms potentially accelerating and sustaining growth are the accumulation of R&D capital (particularly important under partial automation), and hardware-augmenting technical change.

Keywords: long-run growth; factor accumulation; technical change; automation; asymptotic dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O30 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-ore and nep-pay
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sgh:kaewps:2020054

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