Solow and Growth Accounting: A Perspective from Quantitative Economic History.

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.