A sustained rise in an economy's productive capacity, measured by real GDP per capita, which removes the effects of both price changes and population size.

A shortcut for growth: the number of years for real GDP per capita to double equals 70 divided by the annual growth rate.

Output produced per worker; rising productivity is the key to long-run economic growth.

Productivity rises from more physical capital per worker, more human capital per worker, and better technology.

Human-made resources such as machinery, buildings, and equipment used to produce goods and services.

The education, training, and skills embodied in a country's workers.

Advances in the knowledge and methods used to produce goods and services.

A relationship showing how real GDP per worker depends on physical capital per worker, human capital per worker, and the state of technology.

Holding human capital and technology fixed, each additional unit of physical capital per worker adds less to productivity than the one before.

A method that estimates how much each factor of production contributes to economic growth.

The amount of output produced from a given quantity of inputs; its growth, usually reflecting technological progress, is central to long-run growth.

The idea that poorer economies should grow faster and catch up to richer ones, which fits the data only when growth factors like education, infrastructure, and policy are held equal.

Differences in how fast countries accumulate capital drive growth differences; high physical-capital investment is usually financed by high domestic savings.

Spending devoted to creating new products and production methods, the main engine of technological progress.

Growth is helped by infrastructure, a sound banking system, and funding for education and R&D, and is hurt by corruption, political instability, excessive intervention, and weak property rights.

Long-run economic growth appears as a rightward shift of the long-run aggregate supply curve and an outward shift of the production possibilities curve.

Economists generally see environmental degradation as a bigger threat to sustainable growth than natural resource scarcity, which market prices tend to handle on their own.

Emissions are tied to growth, but estimates suggest a large cut in emissions would require only a modest reduction in the growth rate, and there is broad support for government action on climate change.

The gradual wearing out and loss of value of physical capital over time; a country's capital stock grows only when new investment exceeds depreciation.

The basic physical systems, such as roads, ports, power grids, telecommunications, and public health facilities, that support economic activity and are a key government contribution to growth.

Inputs such as land, minerals, and energy; historically an important source of productivity, though a less significant driver of growth in most countries today.

Rapid, sustained growth has transformed India into one of the world's major economies, illustrating how growth can lift a poor country's standing over a few decades.

Concerns that growth could stall as resources run out, echoing 19th-century worries about Britain exhausting its coal, though market prices tend to blunt resource scarcity by encouraging conservation and substitutes.

Estimates of emissions-limiting proposals, such as the Sanders-Boxer plan, suggest that even ambitious climate policy would reduce real GDP per capita only modestly.

Western Europe, considerably poorer than the United States in the 1950s, largely caught up over the following decades, an example of convergence among wealthy nations when growth-supporting conditions are similar.