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This graduate level text on economic growth surveys neoclassical and more recent growth theories, stressing their empirical implications and the relation of theory to data and evidence. The authors have undertaken a major revision for the long-awaited second edition of this widely used text, the first modern textbook devoted to growth theory. The book has been expanded in many areas and incorporates the latest research. After an introductory discussion of economic growth, the book examines neoclassical growth theories, from Solow-Swan in the 1950s and Cass-Koopmans in the 1960s to more recent refinements; this is followed by a discussion of extensions to the model, with expanded treatment in this edition of heterogenity of households. The book then turns to endogenous growth theory, discussing, among other topics, models of endogenous technological progress (with an expanded discussion in this edition of the role of outside competition in the growth process), technological diffusion, and an endogenous determination of labor supply and population. The authors then explain the essentials of growth accounting and apply this framework to endogenous growth models. The final chapters cover empirical analysis of regions and empirical evidence on economic growth for a broad panel of countries from 1960 to 2000. The updated treatment of cross-country growth regressions for this edition uses the new Summers-Heston data set on world income distribution compiled through 2000.

"Barro and Sala-i-Martin have done a superb job of synthesizing much of the existing theoretical and empirical research on the mechanisms and determinants of economic growth and convergence. Though it incorporates much new material, this updated version is fully accessible to a third year undergraduate student, while remaining of invaluable use to any research scholar seriously interested in growth and development economics."
—Phillipe Aghion, Department of Economics, Harvard University

"This is an invaluable book for a first graduate course in economic growth. The exposition is clear and easy to follow, but also rigorous. It is an excellent stepping stone for research in the field."
—K. Daron Acemoglu, Professor of Economics, MIT

"Barro and Sala-i-Martin provide an outstanding and comprehensive treatment of growth theory and empirics—an instant classic! I learn something new every time I pull my copy from the shelf."
—Charles I. Jones, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

Robert J. Barro

Robert Joseph Barro is Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.S. in physics from Caltech.

Barro is co-editor of Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics and was recently President of the Western Economic Association and Vice President of the American Economic Association.

He was a viewpoint columnist for Business Week from 1998 to 2006 and a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 1998. He has written extensively on macroeconomics and economic growth.

Noteworthy research includes empirical determinants of economic growth, economic effects of public debt and budget deficits, and the formation of monetary policy. Recent books include Macroeconomics: A Modern Approach, Economic Growth (2nd edition, written with Xavier Sala-i-Martin), Nothing Is Sacred: Economic Ideas for the New Millennium, Determinants of Economic Growth, and Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society.

Current research focuses on two very different topics: the interplay between religion and political economy and the impact of rare disasters on asset markets and macroeconomic activity.

Xavier Sala-i-Martin

Xavier Sala-i-Martin is a professor of economics at Columbia University. Sala-i-Martin earned his degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1985 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1990, both in economics. In addition to working at Columbia, he has been a professor at Yale University, Harvard University, and the Universitst Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (which he still visits for a term every summer).

Sala-i-Martin is widely recognized as one of the leading economists in the field of economic growth and is consistently ranked among the most-cited economists in the world for works produced in the 1990s. His works include the topics of economic growth, development in Africa, monetary economics, social security, health and economics, classical-liberal thinking (with his book "Liberal economics for non-economists and non-liberals") (the "liberal" in the title should be understood in the classic liberal/libertarian sense), and convergence. He has constructed an estimate of the World Distribution of Income, which he has then used to estimate poverty rates and measures of inequality. The conclusions of this study offered a new point of view, for two reasons. First, the United Nations and the World Bank used to believe that, although poverty rates were falling, the total number of poor people was increasing. Sala-i-Martin claimed that both were falling. Second, the United Nations and the World Bank used to (and still do) believe that individual income inequalities were on the rise. Sala-i-Martin claimed they were not.

He is the author of the economic growth textbook Apuntes de Crecimiento Economico (in Spanish) and the co-author (with Robert Barro) of the textbook Economic Growth (original in English and translated into French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese).

Sala-i-Martin is, along with Elsa V. Artadi, the author of the Global Competiveness Index, used since 2004 by the Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum, an index that ranks 142 countries by their level of economic competitiveness.