Economic Growth: Lecture 1

The aim of this course is to provide you with an understanding of the mech-anisms behind modern economic growth. We’ll focus mainly on developed or transitional economies. While there are many interesting links between growth and development (and we will discuss these), a full treatment of the latter is beyond the scope of this course. There will also be a strong focus on computational methods. Though the study of this topic can be quite interesting in its own right, our primary motivation here will be using the theoretical tools we will have developed in conjunction with computational techniques to generate detailed quantitative predictions. These can in turn help us estimate the parameters particular and refine our understanding of how realistic certain classes of models are. As a practical matter, one needs choose an environment in which to carry out computation. I’m personally OK with any choice you might make, but I would recommend using Python, as it’s free, easy to use, and has a lot of support available both from me and online. In particular, there is a good deal of infor-mation on using Python for economics from Tom Sargent and John Stachurski at Quantitative Economics