Malthus to Solow

A model is provided in which the transition from constant to growing living standards is inevitable given positive rates of total factor productivity growth and involves no change in the structure of the economy. Until very recently, the literature on economic growth focused on explaining features of modern industrial economies while being inconsistent with the growth facts describing pre-industrial economies. This includes both models based on technical progress, such as Solow's (1957) and more recent models with endogenous growth, such as Romer (1986) and Klucas (1988). This paper contributes to a recent literature describing unified growth models that can accounted for the basic growth facts of both eras, as well as the transition between the two. This theory predicts that land's share in production should fall endogenously over time and that there will be an escape from Malthusian stagnation and a transition to modern growth in the sense of Solow.