Colorado Technical University Research Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
ECON201
Macroeconomics Colorado Springs, Colorado
March 2012

Introduction
The economic growth is the process by which per capita income rises over time. Growth theory attempts to model and understand the factors that are behind this process. It is a particularly challenging area of research because growth is extremely uneven in space as well as in time. Over the past millennium, world per capita income increased thirteen-fold, from $435 per person per year around the year 1000 to $5,700 nowadays. This contrasts sharply with the preceding millennia, when there was almost no advance in per capita income. Per capita income
The economic growth is stimulated through different variables that exist in different economies of the countries.
'Economic growth' has been defined as 'a sustained increase over a significant period of time in the quantity and/or quality of the goods and services produced in an economy. From the very birth of political economy , the nature of the causes, sources or determinants of economic growth has remained the central question confronting successive generations of economists and others contributing to the discipline. Economic growth has been variously conceptualized by economists in terms of stages, phases, cycles and long waves.
Economists have also sought to measure long-term patterns of economic growth within and between nations. This growth accounting has identified the post-war era of the Bretton Woods international economic order as an era of exceptionally rapid growth. By contrast, the period since the oil crisis of 1973 has been marked by much slower rates of growth for most economies. However, in both eras there has also been marked variation between national rates of growth with some economies, most notably the United Kingdom, in long-term relative decline (Barro, 2003).
Until the onset of the 1990 collapse of the 'bubble economy' in Japan and the July 1997 Asian financial crisis, the remarkably high growth performance of the Asian 'tiger' economies had attracted particular attention from growth theorists. Political economy has