Modern economic growth is associated with a striking acceleration in the growth of product per capita, which can be interpreted as the result of a switch from a premodern slowly moving equilibrium to a modern explosive disequilibrium growth. This switch corresponds to a ‘fold catastrophe’. In this paper, a catastrophe model of the onset and spread of modern economic growth is articulated and then tested by means of historical data. The results obtained support the notion that modern economic growth originated in England sometime during the eighteenth century and then spread throughout the rest of Europe by a process that had run its course by circa 1840.
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