Introduction

This volume contains a set of chapters I published during the past couple of years, which deal with a theme that is again high on the agenda in economics since the mid-1980s: the problem of innovation, knowledge and economic growth. It was at the centre of interest during the time of the classical economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Karl Marx; it gave way largely to a concern with the static problem of resource allocation in early marginalist authors from William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger to Léon Walras; it was rediscovered by Joseph Alois Schumpeter, who saw capitalism as a restless system that continuously generates economic, social and cultural change from within, epitomised in his famous formula of ‘creative destruction’; and it became again the focus of attention in more recent times in what was dubbed ‘new’ or ‘endogenous’ growth economics.