1. How do you understand the term “The Great Divergence”? List & explain the causes of The Great Divergence.
2. Compare and contrast the factors that are mainly responsible for the growth convergence of East Asia and the growth divergence of “The Rest”.
3. Describe Rostow's theory of economic development and elucidate the claim that this theory consists merely of "empty economic stages".
4. What are Kuznets' main findings, based on data for today's developed economies, about modern economic growth?
Would you expect today's developing economies to undergo the same pattern of growth?
5. Use simple graphs to describe demographic & GDP-structure changes accompanying Modern Economic Growth.
What are the main factors that can help account for each of these?
6. What accounts for the mortality transition? What, in your own view, accounts for the fertility transition?
7. Using simple graphs, describe the demographic and GDP-structural changes that accompany modern economic growth. What are the main factors that can help account for each of these?
8. What are the consumption good, investment good, and insurance good hypotheses for the birth rate transition?
Critique these theories and explain which one you find persuasive.
9. What is the Harrod-Domar equation? How does it explain economic growth? What are some of the factors relevant to growth that it leaves out?
10. How does Adam Smith explain economic growth in terms of his ideas concerning the social and technical divisions of labor.
11. What is the mechanism in Ricardo’s theory that makes labor supply “endogenous”? Draw a graph showing Ricardian long-run economic growth.
12. How is economic structure described in the Lewis model? What are the sources of surplus labor in that model?
13. In what sense is the Lewis model of economic development similar to the classical theory of Ricardo’s and yet also different from the classical theory?