The Economics of the Next Century
Austin Robinson argues that the extraordinarily rapid growth of the British economy in the century 1800-1900 was due to very unequal technical development, with lack of capital and of education limiting the capacity of backward countries to complete with inventing countries. Today multi-national firms, investing where labor of the necessary efficiency is cheapest, combined with widespread technical education make any repetition of nineteenth century export-based leadership virtually impossible. He expects no more than slow growth of the British economy, which by the end of the first quarter of the next century may give us a standard of life comparable to that of the United States today. He speculates on what may be the principal elements in that growth. Copyright 1991 by Royal Economic Society.