Limits to growth and creative destruction in the framework of a vintage capital model[Limites à la croissance et destruction créatrice dans le cadre d'un modèle à générations de capital]

This paper studies the path of a resource-constrained economy in an original vintage capital growth model involving a Schumpeterian process of creative destruction. The path of the economy is characterized by three successive phases: (i) unsustainable « high » growth; (ii) after a peak, a deep and brutal decline; (iii) slower growth gradually leading to equilibrium. The slowdown and reversal of the economy are linked to the continuous rise in the extraction rate of the resource, which occurs despite technical progress due to the creative destruction process. This process also has a non-monotonic trajectory, in particular its destruction component, one of the factors behind the economic obsolescence of equipment. The latter evolves in the opposite direction to production, in contradiction with the widespread assumption of a constant capital depreciation rate.