To the Continuation of the Discussion on the Root Causes of Sustainable Economic Growth (About the Survey by J. Steinsson)
Year by year interest in the issues of sustainable economic development in scientific literature is growing. In economic and statistical terms, sustainable economic growth is a relatively new phenomenon that took shape in the middle of the 19th century, when the dynamics of world GDP reached the level of 2%. Its flywheel was launched by the industrial revolution in Britain. Due to the long time and the lack of an evidence base, many of its determinants continue to be debated. In 2024 Professor J. Steinsson of the University of California at Berkeley offered his interpretation of the conceptual approaches of various scientific schools to assessing the root causes of the Industrial Revolution. Taking into account the emergence of new data and methodological approaches to their processing, the author set himself the task of rethinking the answers to 3 questions: why did the Industrial Revolution take place in general, why did it take place in Britain, and why specifically in Britain in the 18th-19th centuries. Despite the incomparability of nowadays and specifically historical conditions of the first industrial revolution, this task seems practically significant for the current stage, when many countries put the tasks of reindustrialization or mitigation of the consequences of deindustrialization on their main agenda. With the remaining controversiality of many issues of the industrial revolution in Britain, the fundamental importance of coordinating actions in solving the trinity of tasks ensuring sustainable economic growth can be considered proven: acceleration of technological development, interconnection of (re)industrialization and agrarian transformations on an innovative basis, reinforcing these steps with institutional fine-tuning.
Authors
- Sergey Valerievich Chichilimov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3681-4279)
- A. A. Mal'Tsev (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3774-6311)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Issues of Economic Theory
- Published
- 2025-08-10
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.52342/2587-7666vte_2025_3_168_178
- Primary Topic
- Economic and Technological Developments in Russia
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- University of Cambridge
- University of Oxford