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Economic Growth Under Weak And Strong Sustainability Scenarios, Sean Ippolito

McNair Scholars Research Journal

Romer (1990) introduced endogenous growth by placing emphasis on human capital as a major driver of innovation. Barbier (1999) expanded this framework to include a single exhaustible resource, natural capital. These developments added to the discussion of economic growth, innovation, and the production process. This project extends Romer and Barbier’s endogenous growth framework to include natural resource utilization in the consumption function in order to open the discussion to weak and strong sustainability. This project compares the growth rates, steady state, and dynamics across these models so that we more effectively capture non-linearities and feedback loops. Finally, we explore the …