The economic growth enigma revisited: The EU-15 since the 1970s
Introduction
It is too often forgotten that economic growth has been a relatively episodic phenomenon in human history. Modest periods of real growth have occurred at various times in the more distant past, but growth that took a century in the late middle ages is now sometimes compressed into a decade, or even a single year. What has changed?
Ultimately, the debate about future of economic growth is an empirical one, and resolving the debate requires examining fundamental structural parameters of the economy. One key question is: How big are the marginal products of capital, labour and useful energy?
We estimate a semi-parametric production function econometrically using a unique dataset. We then analyze the properties of the production function in order to understand the dynamic behaviour of the three factors of production (capital, labour and useful energy) and of overall economic growth in the EU-15 countries since the 1970s.
The key motivation of the work presented here is to enable the formulation of economic growth theories that fit the historical facts. Methodologically, the work presented here is consistent with Haavelmo's Probability Approach in Economics (Haavelmo, 1944) in the sense of constituting a probabilistic formulation of economic theory using the generalised production function of Eq. (2). Standard macroeconomic analysis then assumes the ‘correct’ economic model and then uses econometrics merely to estimate its parameters from the best available data.
In contrast to this prevailing orthodoxy, we formulate the growth model as a probabilistic production function, but we allow the form of the function to be estimated from data without assuming any particular parametric form. To quote Haavelmo (1989): “The basis of econometrics, the economic theories that we had been led to believe in by our forefathers, were perhaps not good enough. It is quite obvious that if the theories we build to simulate actual economic life are not sufficiently realistic, that is, if the data we get to work on in practice are not produced the way that economic theories suggest, then it is rather meaningless to confront actual observations with relations that describe something else” (Section 4, paragraph 2).
An important advantage of the proposed generalised production function is that it is sufficiently realistic (see Section 3) to permit meaningful links between policy measures and actual growth outcomes.
The familiar Cobb–Douglas production function (of capital and labour) takes the following mathematical form (Cobb and Douglas, 1928):where Yt is the GDP, Kt is the stock of capital and Lt is the stock of labour, while parameters α and β are constants. Following Solow, 1956, Solow, 1957, At has been interpreted as the effect of ‘technical progress’ (now called total factor productivity TFP). This multiplier presumably captures the unexplained fraction of total economic output that is not caused by capital and labour.
We take the view that useful energy is an important factor of production. We reject the standard assumption that the output elasticity of each factor must be equal to the cost share of that factor in the GDP (Kümmel et al., 2010). We also reject the usual assumption that the functional relationship between GDP and capital, labour and useful energy is (log) linear (as is the case with the Cobb–Douglas production function). Instead, we explore empirically whether the marginal products of capital, labour and useful energy are constant, or not. If they are not constant, important policy implications can follow.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 provides a discussion of the key concepts of capital, labour and useful energy. This is followed by the mathematical description of the proposed generalised production function. Section 4 presents the unique dataset for the EU-15 countries used in this study. It also explains how useful energy consumption is estimated. It also presents the historical evolution of the useful energy categories: mechanical work, light, heat, muscle work and other electrical uses. Section 5 presents the key insights of the estimated production function of the EU-15 countries. Concluding remarks and key policy implications are given in Section 6.
Section snippets
Key concepts: capital, labour and useful energy
How can we account for capital? The so-called Cambridge controversies in the 1960s highlighted key problems, notably the difficulty of aggregating heterogeneous capital comprising machines, buildings, inventories, infrastructure, money and even natural resource stocks (Harcourt, 1972). In practice, we adopt Maddison's perpetual inventory method (PIM) to measure capital in monetary terms, accumulating capital from new investment less depreciation (Maddison, 1982).
Another issue is how to define
The generalised (semi-parametric) production function
Our generalised semi-parametric production function should not be understood as a tool for making point-estimates, or deterministic forecasts, as standard parametric (linear or non-linear) production functions are typically used. When (or if) one has prior knowledge of the parametric relationships between the GDP and the factors of production, then it is possible to use non-linear parametric models. However, when, or if, those relationships are not known in advance, our non-parametric approach
EU-15: data and empirical developments
It is hard to see how even the best of theoretical models could do more than frame the questions for empirical studies to address. Thus in the balance of this study, we examine insights that we have gathered from exploring the history of economic growth of the EU-15 countries.
The empirical production function of the EU-15 countries
Because it is not possible to provide a detailed discussion of all the EU-15 countries in a single paper, we provide below some thought-provoking observations to stimulate the thinking of readers.
It is important to note that the marginal product of capital, labour and useful energy should be interpreted with respect to the changes in the (log) level of the factor of production such as percentage changes in the stock of capital or useful energy flows. This is because the proposed production
Conclusions and policy implications
As a way of addressing the economic growth enigma for the EU-15 countries, we re-examined the importance of useful energy by postulating a generalised production function with three factors of production, namely capital, labour and useful energy. Effectively, we argue for a macroeconomic theory that fits the facts, not the contrary.
It is difficult to dispute the argument that abundant useful energy at low cost is fundamental to highly industrialised economies like the EU-15. As argued by
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments. Furthermore, we want to thank the participants of the 2015 GCEP ‘Net Energy Analysis’ workshop at Stanford University.
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