Product proliferation, population, and economic growth

This paper reassesses the long-run relationship between population growth and economic growth in two different frameworks. In the first one, aggregate human capital evolves exogenously over time, while in the second, individuals choose endogenously their investment in education. When endogenous human capital investment takes place, the potential tension between the productivity gains due to specialization and the productivity losses due to more production complexity arising from an expansion in the number of intermediate-input varieties employed in the production of final goods is crucial in determining the sign of the correlation between population growth and per capita income growth.