Olivier de La Grandville is Senior Professor at Frankfurt University and Visiting Professor in the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University. He was Professor of Economics at the University of Geneva from 1978 to 2007 and he is the author of seven books on topics ranging from microeconomics to macroeconomics and finance.

The second edition of this user-friendly book provides a clear and original introduction to the theory of economic growth. The book has been fully updated to incorporate several important new results and proofs, and offers a new solution to the fundamental question: how much should a nation save and invest?

Foreword Robert M. Solow; Preface; Introduction; Part I. Positive Growth Theory: 1. The welfare of society and economic growth; 2. The growth process: an intuitive approach; 3. A production function of central importance; 4. Poverty traps; 5. The CES production function as a general mean in collaboration with Robert M. Solow; 6. Why has the elasticity of substitution most often been observed as smaller than 1? And why is it of importance?; 7. Capital-labour substitution and economic growth in collaboration with Robert M. Solow; 8. The long-term growth rate as a random variable, with an application to the US economy; Part II. Optimal Growth Theory: 9. Optimal growth theory: an introduction to the calculus of variations; 10. Deriving the central equations of the calculus of variations at a single stroke of the pen; 11. Other major tools for optimal growth theory: the Pontryagin maximum principle and the Dorfmanian; 12. First applications to optimal growth; 13. Optimal growth and the optimal savings rate; Part III. A Unified Approach: 14. Preliminaries: interest rates and capital valuation; 15. From arbitrage to equilibrium; 16. Why is traditional optimal growth theory mute? Restoring its rightful voice; 17. Problems in growth: common traits between planned economies and poor countries; 18. From Ibn Khaldun to Adam Smith, and a proof of Smith's conjecture; 19. Capital and economic growth in the coming centuries; In conclusion: on the convergence of ideas and values through civilizations; Further reading, data on growth and references; Index.

In the second edition of this user-friendly book, Olivier de La Grandville provides graduate students and academic researchers with a clear and original introduction to the theory of economic growth, its mechanisms and its challenges. The book has been fully updated to incorporate several important new results and proofs since the first edition, and offers a new solution to the fundamental question: how much should a nation save and invest? In addition to a progressive treatment of dynamic optimization, readers will find intuitive derivations of all central equations of the calculus of variations and of optimal control theory. Contrary to dire contemporary predictions, de La Grandville shows that the optimal savings rule not only corresponds to the maximization of future welfare flows for society, but also maximizes the value of society's activity, as well as the total remuneration of labor.