E&F Talk Evangelos Dioikitopoulos (Athens): Aspirations, the Transition towards Sustained Growth and Comparative Economic Development

The Department for Economics & Finance is happy to welcome Evangelos Dioikitopoulos (Athens) who will speak about:

Aspirations, the Transition towards Sustained Growth and Comparative Economic Development

External guests are kindly requested to register by sending an informal email to Sven.Fischer@brunel.ac.uk

Abstract:

This study highlights the role of materialistic aspirations, i.e., the set of values and personality traits that prioritize the pursuit of material goals, as a cultural phenomenon of significance in relation to economic transformation and development. It presents a model that shows why an endogenous cultural change towards more widespread adherence to materialistic aspirations is both a cause and an effect of productivity growth. This cultural-economic complementarity is a powerful mechanism of endogenous productivity growth; it also determines the prevalence of different cultural values vis-à-vis the prominence of material objectives. In accordance to historical evidence, our model’s calibration reveals that its outcomes offer a reasonably good fit for the evolution of income per capita and the materialistic culture, captured by the number famous “materialists” around the globe. Also, we provide numerical examples that show the role of unfavourable institutions to materialism on the timing of take-off from the pre-industrial world. Finally, we extend our analysis to empirically investigate the origins of deep-routed aspirations and their effect on contemporary economic development such as GDP per capita and patents per capita at country level and light density at ethnic group level.