Recent Technological and Economic Change among Industrialized Countries: Insights from Population Growth*

Cross‐country observations on the effects of population growth are used to show why differences in rates of growth in working‐age population may be a key to understanding differences in economic performance across industrialized countries over the period 1975–1997 versus 1960–1974. In particular, we argue that countries with lower rates of adult population growth adopted new capital‐intensive technologies more quickly than their high population growth counterparts, therefore allowing them to reduce their work time without deterioration of growth in output‐per‐adult.