Skip to main content

Balanced growth despite uzawa

Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, Ezra Oberfield and Thomas Sampson


The evidence for the United States points to balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and a less-than-unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theorem. We extend Uzawa's theorem to show that the introduction of human capital accumulation in the standard way does not resolve the puzzle. However, balanced growth is possible if education is endogenous and capital is more complementary with schooling than with raw labor. We present a class of aggregate production functions for which a neoclassical growth model with capital-augmenting technological progress and endogenous schooling converges to a balanced growth path.


1 April 2017


American Economic Review 107(4) , pp.1293-1312, 2017


DOI: 10.1257/aer.20151739

http://hdl.handle.net/10419/130399

This Journal article is published under the centre's Trade programme.