{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0316333118140736, 'fraction_numerical': 0.02711426726920594, 'mean_word_length': 4.7835820895522385, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Economic growth: new recipes from old books?

The importance of studying economic growth and investigating its causes seems obvious. Though it is by no means certain that growth will be accompanied by development or increasing equality, it offers unrivalled potential to reduce poverty in developing nations and improve the general standard of living for those lucky enough to be born in the developed world. ‘It fires the imagination that policy might be able to influence economic growth . . .’ (Quah, 1996: 1353). Indeed, what a prize it would be if the result of all of the research into growth came up with hard and fast rules that governments could implement to improve the growth of their economies and hopefully the welfare of their citizens. Explanations of economic growth date as far back as the classical economists, Smith, Hume and Malthus. Smith (1776) saw growth as a product of specialization and the division of labour resulting from the scale of markets and trade. Mokyr (1990) calls this ‘Smithian’ growth and Romer (1996) recently defended its importance as a critical element in the growth process. The origins of modern growth theory can also be traced back further than is generally acknowledged. Almost 30 years before the seminal works of Solow (1956) and Swan (1956), Frank Ramsey’s (1928) paper ‘A mathematical theory of saving’ was merely a growing population short of being a general theory of growth. Earlier still, John Rae (1834) identified the basic ideas of what we now call endogenous growth theory (Brewer, 1991).