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lthough Thirlwall (1997, p. 378) himself would come to argue that perhaps ‘stylised fact’ or ‘empirical generalisation’, rather than ‘law’, would be a better description.Basically, the theory of BP-constrained growth postulates that the balance-of-payments position of a country is the main constraint on its growth rate, since it imposes a limit on https://www.51lunwen.org/mgjingji/
demand to which supply can (usually) adapt. As it turns out, observed differences in growth performance between countries are associated with the relative strength of their balance-ofpayments position. According to Thirlwall (1979), if we assume that real exchange rates are constant and that trademust be balanced in the long run, there is a very close correspondence betweenthe growth rate of output and the ratio of the growthof exports to the income elasticity of demand for imports. Indeed, this result is the prediction of a dynamic version of theHarrod trade multiplier (1933), of which Thirlwall claimed not to be aware at the time, and it is a consistent alternative to the still predominant, neoclassical viewthat growth-rate differences
should be explained by exogenous differences in the rate of growth of factor supplies and technical progress.1 According to Thirlwall (1997, p. 380), ‘[t]here are not many countries in the world, particularly developing countries, that could not utilize (or generate) more domestic resources given the greater availability of foreign exchange . . . and the fundamental importance of exports as a component of demand is that it is the only component that can provide the foreign exchange to pay for the import content of other components of demand—
consumption, investment, and government expenditure’ (original emphasis). It should be stressed that the BP-constrained growth approach, despite being demandoriented,does acknowledge the importance of the supply characteristics of goods. Indeed,observed differences in the income elasticities of demand for exports and imports reflect the
non-price characteristics of goods and, therefore, the structure of production (Thirlwall,1997, p. 383).2 Hence, the only sure and long-term solution to raising a country’s growthrate consistent with balance-of-payments equilibrium is structural change to raise its income elasticity of exports and to reduce its income elasticity of imports (Thirlwall, 2002, p. 78).Structural change, however, has not been fully and systematically incorporated intoKeynesian, demand-oriented theories of output growth, a notable exception being the socalledstructural economic dynamics (SED) approach developed by Pasinetti (1981, 1993).3One major implication of the SED approach is that changes in the structure of production1 The introduction to McCombie and Thirlwall (2004) reads that thebalance-of-payments-equilibrium growth rate derived in Thirlwall (1979) is now known as the dynamic Harrod trade multiplier result (p. 12).
2 ‘Income elasticities determine the BP-constrained growth rate, but the supply characteristics of goods
(such as their technical sophistication, quality etc.) determine relative income elasticities. In this important
respect, there can be a marrying of the demand and supply sideexplanations of the comparative growth performance of nations’ (McCombie and Thirlwall, 1994, p. 391).
3 Indeed, as we were correctly reminded by a referee, the notion that structural change has important implications for economic growth has a broad