This chapter develops a microfounded model of institutional changes and uses it to examine the joint production of institutions and economic output. In that model, agents must decide to participate in the political life of the city, participation whose level affects the level of the quality of institutions, as well as the possibilities of long-run economic expansion. It is shown that there exists a critical threshold for the quality of institutions below which agents do not participate to the political life, and above which they do participate. It is also shown that the presence of political participation does not suffice to bring immediate economic take-off: several generations of citizens with positive political participation are needed to achieve economic take-off.

This introduction presents the main challenges raised by the economic analysis of the long period, as well as the most recent economic approach called Unified Growth Theory. The introduction also presents the goal of this textbook - to allow all students from economics and the social sciences to have access to Unified Growth Theory, as well as the different parts and chapters of the textbook.

This chapter extends the previous ones by examining the constraints that the natural environment imposes on economic development over the long period. The congestion of the (finite-sized) planet Earth is examined, as well as the consequences of environmental damages on the possibilities of long-run economic expansion.

This chapter provides a short introduction to the main economic approaches to the study of the long period, by focusing on the pioneer works of Malthus, Marx, Marshall, Kondratiev, Rostow and Solow. This allows us also to provide some genealogical elements to Galor's Unified Growth Theory.

This chapter develops a simplified discrete-time version of Kremer's model (Kremer QJE 1993) aimed at explaining the existence of a transition from a stagnation regime (where GDP per capita remains constant despite continuous technological progress) to the modern growth regime (where GDP per capita grows continuously despite population growth). As such, this chapter provides a first illustration of what a Unified Growth Model can bring to the study of the long period. We also use that model to cast some light on the Industrial Revolution, and its particular timing and location in space.

This chapter provides some major stylized facts for the economic analysis of the long period, by focusing on statistical series of GDP, population size and GDP per capita for the last two millenia. The structural break observed in the GDP per capita series is presented as a major challenge for existing economic theories of the long period. How could one explain both a long period of stagnation and, then, an economic take-off followed by sustained growth?

This chapter provides an institutional variant of the model studied in the previous chapter, where the key variable driving the economy's latent dynamics is the quality of institutions. This chapter also analyses, using that framework, the interactions between economic development, institutional changes and inequalities.

This book provides a simple introduction to the economic analysis of the long period by means of Oded Galor's Unified Growth Theory. This aims at making Unified Growth Theory accessible for undergraduate students in Economics and the other Social Sciences. Using simple theoretical frameworks with or without microeconomic foundations, it shows how the major concepts of Unified Growth Theory – the economic regime, the regime shift, critical thresholds, latent dynamics – can be used to study the dynamics of societies over long horizons of time. Applications to the long-run dynamics of production, inequalities, institutions and the natural environment are examined.

This chapter uses Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population to provide a simple model of stagnation, which explains GDP per capita’s flat trend during the longest part of History. That model of Malthusian stagnation explains the constancy of standards of living as follows: during the longest part of History, each time a technological progress took place, this was followed by a rise in population size that annihilated any improvement in standards of living. As such, this chapter provides one possible representation of the stagnation regime. Criticisms of that theory of long-run stagnation by Marx, Weyland and others are also examined.

One of the most influential individuals of modern history is Mao Zedong – or Chairman Mao. He lived an extraordinary life. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist ideology of communism while a student at Peking University, Mao was a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1927. He immediately led an insurrection – the Autumn Harvest Uprising – that initiated a civil war with the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party that then ruled China. It was a war that would last until 1949 (although interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945). When Mao’s CPC finally defeated the nationalists, the KMT and its followers retreated to Taiwan. This is the reason that China still does not recognise Taiwan as an independent country today.