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We investigate a structural model of demographic-economic interactions for England during 1570 to 1850. We estimate that the annual rate of population growth consistent with constant real wages was 0.4% before 1760 but 1.5% thereafter. We find that exogenous shocks increased population growth dramatically in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. Simulations of our model show that if these demographic shocks had occurred before the Industrial Revolution the impact on real wages would have been catastrophic and that these shocks were largely responsible for very slow growth of real wages during the Industrial Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic decline experienced by the UK was most noticeable during the 1950s and 1970s. However, a more optimistic assessment of the UK economy was given in the 1980s due to changes in the supply-side policy and apprehensions of its long-run implications. Studies in growth economics have shed light on what went wrong during the 1970s and the implications of what transpired in the 1980s. It was concluded that a limited reversal in the decline may have been due to the Thatcherite reforms in the 1980s. Deindustrialization has been found to be important in itself.

This paper considers the accuracy of traditional TFP growth estimates using a methodology that takes account of scale economies, fixed factors of production and adjustment costs to reveal underlying 'pure technological change'. The results suggest that these biases vary substantially over time but do not impact heavily on Anglo-German comparisons. In both countries the early postwar years are a period when adjustment costs from a rising supply price of capital goods hold down TFP growth below that which could have accrued from pure technological progress. As might be expected, this problem largely disappeared in the later globalisation period.

The contribution of steam to British economic growth in the nineteenth century is estimated using growth accounting methods similar to those recently employed to examine the role of ICT. The results indicate that steam contributed little to growth before 1830 and had its peak impact about a hundred years after Watt's famous invention. Only with the advent of high-pressure steam after 1850 did the technology realise its potential. Compared with ICT, steam's impact on the annual rate of growth was modest. It is unlikely that these conclusions are vulnerable to quantification of hitherto unmeasured TFP spillovers.

We develop new aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth estimates for the USA between 1899 and 1941, and sectoral estimates at the most disaggregated level so far, 38 industries. We include hard-to-measure services, and a refined measure of sectoral labour quality growth. The resulting data set supersedes Kendrick (1961), showing TFP growth lower than previously thought, broadly based across industries, and strongly variant intertemporally. The four 'great inventions' that Gordon (2016) highlighted were important but less dominant in TFP growth than their predecessors in the British industrial revolution. The findings also make it unlikely the 1930s had the twentieth century's highest TFP growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]