Growth or stagnation in pre-industrial Britain? A revealed income growth approach

Christian Groth and Karl Gunnar Persson
Additional contact information
Christian Groth: Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
Karl Gunnar Persson: Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: The extent of growth in pre-industrial Europe in general and in Britain in particular has attracted intense scholarly focus. Growth or Malthusian stagnation? No consensus has evolved. Reconstructions of national income from 1300 and up to the Industrial Revolution come to opposing conclusions and so do econometric studies. Applying Engels’ law, we suggest a new approach in which income growth is revealed by changes in occupational structure. Data needed for this approach are less contested than the wage and output series used in the existing literature. We find that pre-industrial Britain exhibited secular rise in the standard of living.

Keywords: Malthusian stagnation; Engel’s law; Revealed income growth; Pre-industrial productivity growth; Structural change. JEL Classification: E24, N13, O11, O41, O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/resear ... 264-2016_persson.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:264

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().