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Divergence between economies appears more prevalent than convergence, though the human development index shows poorer countries performing in a more encouraging way.

This paper considers 'unconventional' monetary stimulus and supply-side reform as ways to speed up UK recovery in the context of fiscal consolidation, drawing on the experience of the 1930s and 1980s. To imitate the 1930s, the inflation-targeting regime may need to be reformed to cut real interest rates, with land-use planning liberalised to 'crowd in' residential investment. To emulate the 1980s, supply-side reforms to improve productivity and to raise permanent income are required and possibilities in the areas of infrastructure, education and taxation are outlined. A problem common to all these options is that they are 'politically challenging'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates industrial location in the USA around the turn of the 20th century using a model which subsumes both market-potential and factor-endowment arguments. The results show that market potential was central to the existence of the manufacturing belt, that it mattered more than factor endowments, and that its impact came through interactions both with scale economies and with linkage effects. Market potential was generally much higher for states in the manufacturing belt. Natural advantage played a role in industrial location decisions in the late 19th century but its importance then faded away. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of competition in British productivity performance over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents and discusses errors within the article "Were British railway companies well managed in the early twentieth century?" by Nicholas Crafts, Timothy Leunig, and Abay Mulatu, that was published in the November 2008 issue of the journal.

This paper provides a survey of the Great Depression comprising both a narrative account and a detailed review of the empirical evidence, focusing especially on the experience of the United States. We examine the reasons for and flawed resolution of the American banking crisis, as well as the conduct of fiscal and monetary policy. We also consider the pivotal role of the gold standard in the international transmission of the slump and leaving gold as a route to recovery. Policy lessons for today from the Great Depression are discussed, as are some implications for macroeconomics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theory and evidence on the effects of public investment on growth and productivity are reviewed. It is concluded that, on average, public capital has positive impacts on output and private investment, partly offset by the effects of the taxation needed to finance it. A possible future shortfall in public capital in the UK is highlighted. The paper also reviews the contribution of transport infrastructure to productivity and considers implications for cost–benefit analysis. It is suggested that there is a case for greater UK investment in roads but, ideally, this should be implemented along with an efficient national road-pricing scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines major privately owned British railway companies before the First World War. Quantitative evidence is presented on return on capital employed (ROCE), total factor productivity (TFP) growth, cost inefficiency, and speed of passenger services. There were discrepancies in performance across companies but ROCE and TFP typically fell during our period. Cost inefficiency rose before 1900 but then was brought under control as a profits collapse loomed. Without the discipline of either strong competition or effective regulation, managerial failure was common. This sector is an important qualification to the conventional wisdom that late Victorian Britain did not fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This article explores the location of industry in pre-World War I Britain using a model that takes account both of factor endowment and also of New Economic Geography influences. Broadly speaking, the pattern of industrial location in this period was quite persistent and regional specialization changed little. The econometric results show that factor endowments had much stronger effects than proximity to markets, although the latter was an attraction for industries with large plant size. Overall, falling transport costs had relatively little effect on industrial location at a time when proximity to natural resources, notably coal, mattered most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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Where transport costs were falling, were the new economic geography forces for industry agglomeration and dispersion at work in the location of industry in pre-1931 Britain? This paper examines the issue empirically using a general model that nests the Heckscher-Ohlin factor endowment with new economic geography models. The evidence suggests that while the location of pre-1931 British industry was mainly driven by the former, the scale economies aspect of the latter also played a role. [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]

The issue of why productivity growth during the British industrial revolution was slow despite the arrival of famous inventions is revisited using a growth accounting methodology based on an embodied innovation model. The results highlight the relatively small and long-delayed impact of steam on productivity growth even when capital deepening is taken into account. Even so, technological change including embodiment effects accounted entirely for the acceleration in labor productivity growth that allowed the economy to achieve "modem economic growth." [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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers the role of institutional quality in the medium-term growth prospects of the former communist countries of eastern Europe. There is a large gap in adherence to the rule of law between the countries about to join the European Union and the rest. Growth regressions are used to show that this is likely to have a substantial effect on future growth performance by raising the quantity and quality of nvestment and that the prospects for those countries who are not accession candidates are much less good than was generally believed in the early days of transition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reviews the historical evidence on the relationship between globalisation and economic growth. Divergence in the growth of income and industrialisation in the twentieth century is documented but it is also noted that international income inequality appears to have decreased since about 1870 and that long-run trends in the Human Development Index are much less pessimistic about the experience of developing countries. It is argued that trade liberalisation has been good for growth on average but that successful capital liberalisation requires high institutional quality and that the developmental state may have an important role to play in the early stages of development. The recent claim by Robert Lucas that the 21st century will see a massive reduction in income inequality across countries in a globalised world economy is sceptically discussed in the context of empirical evidence that bad institutions are often persistent and that geography is still a major factor in explaining international income differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on British productivity performance from 1950 to 1979. The article also explores the microeconomics of manufacturing productivity outcomes in terms of exploring the incentive structures that informed investment and, particularly, innovation decisions by firms and the policy stance of successive governments. The distinctive features of the papers include their use of economic theory and their quantitative approach to testing hypotheses. Two caveats need to be made to the suggestion that British trade performance gives no cause for concern. First, given that innovation and human capital formation are positive influences on manufactured exports, Great Britain's dramatic loss of world market share can be seen as a diagnostic of weaknesses in domestic manufacturing. Second, as is well known, the UK had a strong tendency for exports to grow more slowly than imports at a constant real exchange rate. Over time this was corrected by periodic devaluations. The implication was that the terms of trade moved less favorably than was the case for strong trade performers such as Germany. Adjusting real gross domestic product growth for terms of trade effects adds about 0.5 per cent per year to the gap in real income growth between Great Britain and Germany during 1950-73.

Discusses the measure of utility-based real national income in Great Britain. Concept of the index of sustainable economic welfare; Real gross domestic product per head in the national accounts; Incorporation of improved life expectancy into national income; Indifference curves map.

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.