Recent technological and economic change among industrialized countries: Insights from population growth

Cross-country observations on the effects of population growth are used to show why differences in rates of growth in working-age population may be a key to understanding differences in economic performance across industrialized countries over the period 1975-1997 versus 1960-1974. In particular, we argue that countries with lower rates of adult population growth adopted new capital-intensive technologies more quickly than their high population growth counterparts, therefore allowing them to reduce their work time without deterioration of growth in output-per-adult.