IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v40y2016i3p871-894..html

The Australian growth miracle: an evolutionary macroeconomic explanation

Author

Listed:
  • John Foster

Abstract

An evolutionary macroeconomic approach is applied to explain economic growth in Australia from 1901 to 2008. Support is found for the hypothesis that there were two distinct developmental phases: before and after World War II. The evidence suggests that, in each phase, growth followed an innovation diffusion trajectory made possible by a growing capital stock. In the first phase, capital equipment seems to have augmented labour while, in the second, it reduced labour inputs, replaced by cheap fossil fuel inputs. This allowed significant transfers of labour into an expanding service sector. Strong economies of scale were operative in both phases, with labour hour inputs dominating in the first phase and fossil fuel consumption in the second. The results indicate that the Australian economy currently has very strong growth potential over the coming decade, although its heavy reliance on fossil fuels is viewed as a threat in the medium term.

Suggested Citation

  • John Foster, 2016. "The Australian growth miracle: an evolutionary macroeconomic explanation," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 40(3), pages 871-894.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:40:y:2016:i:3:p:871-894.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/bev027
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Foster, John, 2021. "In search of a suitable heuristic for evolutionary economics: from generalized Darwinism to economic self-organisation," MPRA Paper 106146, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. John Foster, 2017. "Prior Commitment and Uncertainty in Complex Economic Systems: Reinstating History in the Core of Economic Analysis," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 64(4), pages 392-418, September.
    3. Doré, Natalia I. & Teixeira, Aurora A.C., 2023. "The role of human capital, structural change, and institutional quality on Brazil's economic growth over the last two hundred years (1822–2019)," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 1-12.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:40:y:2016:i:3:p:871-894.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.