When the private and social returns of investment diminish too much, growth cannot be sustained indefinitely

Why Do Economies Stop Growing?

by Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is currently Chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development, an international body charged with charting opportunities for global economic growt 

Over the years, advanced and developing countries have experimented, sometimes deliberately and frequently inadvertently, with a variety of approaches to growth. Unfortunately, many of these strategies have turned out to have built-in limitations or decelerators – what one might call elements of unsustainability. And avoiding serious damage and difficult recoveries requires us to get a lot better at recognizing these self-limiting growth patterns early on.  Here are some of the items in a growing library of decelerating growth models.

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