In the 1970s Robert Lucas's research revolutionized the study of business cycles, and in 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for this work. However, in 1985 he had already decided that, “I did not look forward to the prospect of spending the latter half of my career trying to hang on to what I had done in the first half” (p. 2). Thus, he embarked on a new task: understanding economic growth.

This book collects Lucas's writing (from 1985 to 1997) on economic growth. In his words, its “general theme … is the attempt to adapt modern growth theory, originally developed to describe the behavior of the industrialized economies, to obtain a unified understanding of rich and poor economies alike in a world of vast income and growth rate differences” (p. 1). This theme is carried through an introduction and five chapters, four of which have been published previously as journal articles.