ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Growth Economics and Neoclassical Synthesis in the 1960s
Author: Assous Michael, Manseri Sonia
Growth economics became an active field of research in the mid 1950s, mostly after the publication of Robert Solow’s « A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth ». In the Solow model, at each moment a temporary equilibrium with full employment of capital and labor is achieved by way of the automatic equality of saving to investment, that is, under Say’s law implicitly assumed. These temporary equilibria form an asymptotically stable growth path, which rules out at the outset any possibility for the economy to trigger off a disequilibrium process. Thus, what Solow did consisted not merely of relaxing the assumption of fixed coefficients but particularly in not introducing an independent investment function. In the early 1960, economists from both Cambridge tried hard to revisit the conditions that guarantee the stability of long-run path. Our goal in this article is to look at how these economists, operating in distinct academic communities and political contexts, came to design new mechanisms and devices as well as new “visions” likely to address problems of growth and instability. By means of unedited correspondence and unpublished manuscripts recently discovered in the archives of Duke University and Cambridge (UK), this article concentrates particularly on major elements raised by Hahn, Kaldor, Samuelson, Sen and Solow.
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