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I examine the implications of technological change for productivity, real wages and factor shares during the industrial revolution using recently available data. This shows that real GDP per worker grew faster than real consumption earnings but labour's share of national income changed little as real product wages grew at a similar rate to labour productivity in the medium term. The period saw modest total factor productivity growth which limited the growth both of real wages and of labour productivity. Economists looking for an historical example of rapid labour-saving technological progress having a seriously adverse impact on labour's share must look elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research relating to productivity growth during the British industrial revolution is reviewed. This confirms that there was a gradual acceleration rather than a 'take‐off'. The explanation for the speeding‐up of technological progress remains controversial but the evidence base has improved considerably. In the face of a surge in population growth, slow growth of real wages during the industrial revolution may be seen as a good outcome which was underpinned by improved growth potential. Slow total factor productivity growth from the 1870s suggests that British technological capabilities at the end of the industrial revolution were still quite limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

We analyse TFP growth in the US business sector using a basic unobserved component model where trend growth follows a random walk and the noise is a first order autoregression. This is fitted using a Kalman-filter methodology. We find that trend TFP growth has declined steadily from 1.5 to 1.0 per cent per year over the past 50 years. Nevertheless, recent trends are not a good guide to actual medium-term TFP growth. This exhibits substantial variations and is quite unpredictable. Techno-optimists should not give best to productivity pessimists simply because recent TFP growth has been weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews some of the major claims in Robert Gordon's Rise and Fall of American Growth. His argument that growth of conventional real GDP per person is well below that of real living standards is accepted. It is shown that adding an imputation to GDP for reductions in mortality raises growth substantially, especially between 1929 and 1950. Gordon is also right that total factor productivity growth peaked in the second and third quarters of the twentieth century but his claim that there was a 'great leap forward' in the 1940s, stimulated by World War 2, is not persuasive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the approach to technological change by quantitative economic historians. It suggests that there has been a continuing tension between what economics has to offer economic history by way of technical methods and what economic historians would like to find in economic models. In this area, there has been a danger that use of economic analysis would impoverish historical enquiry. Since the advent of new growth economics the situation has improved in the sense that there is now greater congruence between the hypotheses proposed by cliometricians and the resources that economics has available to them to investigate these ideas rigorously. Unfortunately, however, economists are still reluctant to learn from economic historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article presents the author's opinions on why economist Robert Solow's 1957 paper, which analyzed the sources of growth contributions from aggregate production function and claimed that labor productivity growth in the U.S. was from the contribution of total factor productivity, influenced the development of growth accounting. The author considers the importance that growth accounting has had in economic growth research. How growth accounting has been used by economic historians, how the generalizations about the sources of modern economic growth that emerged from growth accounting in industrialized countries, and how growth accounting changed history are discussed.

Abstract: This paper revisits the issue of the productivity performance of Britain’s railways with an improved dataset and modern cliometrics. We find a slowdown in TFP growth between 1850 and 1870, after which it stabilized at about 1.1%. An analysis of company-level productivity performance reveals large discrepancies in TFP growth and substantial cost inefficiency. The evidence suggests that there was managerial failure in companies with agency problems in a context of collusion and high entry barriers. A wider implication is that the neoclassical exoneration of late-Victorian British management may be less convincing for the services sector than for manufacturing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article evaluates claims that productivity growth in Europe has been undermined by weak competition and excessive regulation and taxation. The argument has some validity in the context of the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution. Great Britain has been well-placed to benefit from ICT but experiences a productivity gap which reflects historically low investment and high employment of low-productivity workers.

The paper reviews theory and evidence on the ways in which regulation affects productivity outcomes. In a context of endogenous growth, it is argued that traditional measures of compliance costs miss the potentially most important impacts of regulation on productivity which occur through changes in incentives to invest and to innovate. Recent attempts to measure cross-country variations in the strength of product-market and employment regulation are considered and some weaknesses are highlighted. Nevertheless, consistent with endogenous growth models, there appears to be quite strong evidence that regulations which inhibit entry into product markets have an adverse effect on TFP growth in OECD countries. Although there are some discrepancies in the evidence, on most measures the UK appears lightly regulated relative to France and Germany, and this may have contributed to a reduction in the recent past in the UK's TFP gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews recent attempts to quantify the British industrial revolution. It concludes that the episode was one of rapid industrialization but modest growth. To a considerable extent this is explained by the early adoption of capitalist farming and the weak impact of steam on productivity growth. However, this should not detract from a marked acceleration in the rate of technological change by the second quarter of the 19th century. This may be explicable in an endogenous innovation framework in terms of a reduced cost of accessing useful knowledge. Models of long-run growth should take this enhanced technological capability seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes that there are serious problems with the hypothesis that the Victorian climacteric was driven by the decline phase of steam as a General Purpose Technology. This is primarily because steam’s contribution to industrial output and labour productivity growth was stronger after 1870 than before and that the non-steam-intensive sectors exhibited an inverted U-shape in trend output growth through the 19th century, experiencing a marked slowdown between 1830 and the 1870s. Seeking to base an account of 19th century British growth primarily on the implications of steam is thus misconceived. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Analyzes productivity performance in Great Britain through the use of insights from growth economies and its embodiment in growth accounting techniques. Calculation of labor productivity; Productivity performance evidence; Impact of economic incentives on productivity outcomes; Approach to the productivity problem.

This paper reviews UK supply-side policies since 2010 in terms of their impact on growth and considers medium-term growth prospects in the context of the puzzle of disappointing post-crisis TFP performance. It is argued that there is no reason to believe that growth prospects have deteriorated significantly compared with the pre-crisis period. Changes in policy under the Coalition government are unlikely to have made a big difference to growth potential. On the one hand, this means opportunities for radical reform have been ignored; on the other hand, there has been no repeat of the 1930s’ debacle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews European experience in productivity advance since the war in the light of new growth theory, rent-seeking and catch-up explanations of growth performance. The evidence is analysed using a mixture of regression analysis, case studies and a modified form of growth accounting. Policy implications are derived relating both to Western and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. It is argued that the concentration of new growth theory on factor accumulation proves of only limited use in explaining growth differences within the OECD and that it is crucial to investigate rent seeking and institutional differences as well. In particular, it is important not to exaggerate the role of physical investment in explaining why growth rates differ. Similarly, it is stressed that catching-up of advanced countries by followers is by no means an automatic process and has proceeded unevenly. Recent ideas in growth economics are shown to require urgent revision of traditional growth accounting analysis Supply-side policy including institutional design is seen as the key to rapid catch-up but political constraints in this area are highlighted. Accordingly, the policy recommendations in the paper emphasize the role of pre-commitment through international agreements as an important growth-promoting factor in 1990s Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]