Rapid Growth and Relative Decline

Book excerpt: Do high rates of economic growth create conditions favourable to their own maintenance? Or can a period of high growth 'sow the seeds of its own destruction'? This book addresses these questions by conceiving growth and structural change as path dependent processes. Methodological, theoretical and empirical insights are combined in an extended model of cumulative causation, which shows how endogenously induced technological and institutional changes may cause the dynamics of a period of high growth to break down. This casts new light on the debate over Britain's economic decline.