Resources, producibility and economic dynamics: a framework

The evolving relationship between the ownership and utilization of nonproduced resources, the distribution of national income and wealth, and the formation and investment of capital funds within and across countries is a central feature in the structural dynamics of the world economy. Important features of that relationship have been a central focus of the theory of economic dynamics since Thomas Robert Malthus’s (1815a, 1815b), Edward West’s (1815) and David Ricardo’s (1817) analysis of decreasing returns due to the emergence of scarcities and complementarities between productive inputs (which implies that the utilization of any given technique requires the maintenance of given proportions between those inputs). A central feature of the structural tradition in the study of resource-induced economic dynamics is the attention to the influence of changing re source constraints on the compositional dynamics of the economic system, quite independently of the behavioural propensities of individual agents or groups. This argument calls attention to the existence of critical, if seldom acknowledged, thresholds along the dynamic path of any given economic system, due to both the utilization of non-produced resources and changes in which resources are used across different time periods. The existence of those thresholds may thwart the economic system from one dynamic path to another. This possibility highlights the important role of economic (structural) policy in stimulating or slowing down the pace of resource-induced structural transformation (that is, structural transformation induced by constraints on resource availability and by the switch from one resource base to another).