[1] Born and raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, he completed his bachelor's degree in economics summa cum laude at Harvard University.
Abramovitz died at Stanford Hospital in California on December 1, 2000, at the age of 88, after contracting a gastrointestinal infection.
Abramovitz, called Moe by family and friends, was known for his modest personality and was described as one of the least ego-driven scholars in economics.
After finishing his doctorate at Columbia, he joined the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where he began his investigation of inventory investment cycles.
His 1986 article, "Catching Up, Forging Ahead and Falling Behind" is the second most cited of all the papers published by the Journal of Economic History.
He referred to total factor productivity as a "measure of our ignorance about the causes of economic growth".This result is surprising in the lopsided importance which it appears to give to productivity increase, and it should be, in a sense, sobering, if not discouraging, to students of economic growth.
He essentially concluded that the key to the growth was Western Europe's ability to import and implement technology from the United States.
In the process, the country creates more jobs and more capital, which means the economy's total revenue will increase more and more quickly.
If a country cannot adapt to the technology it is offered, it will not be able to generate more capital, which will cause the catch-up process to fail.