Economic Growth with Structural Change: an Introduction

The dynamics of modern economic systems since the Industrial Revolution show that permanent changes in the absolute levels of some basic magnitudes (such as GNP, total consumption, total investments, total employment, …) are generally associated with changes in their composition, i.e. with structural change. While at the beginning it is not easy to distinguish between genuine and purely transitory and reversible changes, as time goes on, transitory changes cancel out and long-run tendencies emerge clearly. It thereby becomes possible to single out the interrelations between the cumulative movements of certain magnitudes and the changes that take place in their structures.