Technological Change And Economic Growth: A Viewpoint Of Energy And Material

New Growth Theory has made technological change endogenous, overcoming the flaw of exogenous technology in the Neoclassic Growth Theory. The New Growth Theory gives main attention to the mechanism that the internal factor in economic system affects the knowledge and technological change. However, it has not provided thorough analysis on the detailed way that the knowledge and technological change raise the output. In the New Growth Models, the technical independent variable almost appears in the aggregate quantity production function directly. Hence the technological change is embodied in increase of the independent variable and induced increase of output directly. However the realistic situation is not so simple. Inspecting production process, we can discover that the knowledge and technological change reduce wasting works of people in the production, and enhance the production efficiency. On the other hand, they increase machine power unceasingly to improve productivity. Those are two mechanisms that the knowledge and technological change raise the output. Depending only on the first mechanism, the output increase caused by the knowledge and technological change is limited. Even if people do not waste any energy in the production, for completing the production they still have to consume a certain energy which is decided by the physical characteristic difference between desirable goods and natural material. Through abstracting and refining production process, the paper infers the production function, establishes a growth model to study evolutions of the production efficiency, the knowledge storage quantity and the machine power, and discusses the mechanism that the knowledge and technological change guarantee sustained growth with the point of view different to the formers. So I try hard to provide a new analysis framework for understanding economic growth more comprehensively.The Introduction inspects the production process in the viewpoint of energy and material, pointing out the production process is the one that taking natural material as object, desirable goods for goal, energy is consumed to transform the former into the latter. That is the main point of this paper. The Second Part studies Manpower Economy, namely people use their own strength to produce, obtains the production function of final product, and analyzes production efficiency enhancement and the mechanism of the knowledge and technological change that production efficiency enhancement represents. Moreover this part points out the growth rate of manpower economy tends to zero for a long time, laying the foundation for the analysis of the third part. The Third Part is the key section of this paper. Introducing machine to the production process, I study the Machine Economy using machines to produce, and parse the relationship between technological change and the difficulty in manufacturing higher power machines. Besides I prove that technological change makes the optimum machine power to increase, thus the economy may keep sustained growth, and the growth rate tends to a constant for a long time. The Fourth Part is an attempt to develop the model. In this part I inspect the complete competition equilibrium market, and compare the model with the Neoclassic Growth Model.