Trading gains: new estimates of Swiss GDP,1851 to 2008

Christian Stohr

Economic History Working Papers from London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History

Abstract: This paper revises Swiss GDP emphasizing the difference between single and double deflation, which depends on trading gains: i.e. gains from terms of trade and from the real exchange rate. These gains contributed significantly to Swiss economic growth between 1930 and 1990. Earlier series of Swiss GDP have neglected trading gains. In backward projections, this leads to overestimation of GDP (per capita) levels. The Maddison database (Bolt & Zanden 2014), for example, suggests that Swiss GDP per capita was 38 percent above that of the USA in 1875. My series shows that Swiss GDP per capita was still below the Western European average

Keywords: Historical National Accounts; Gross Domestic Income; Double deflation; Real Exchange Rate; Terms of Trade; Switzerland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C82 E01 N13 N14 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ger and nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/67032/ Open access version. (application/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:ehl:wpaper:67032

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic History Working Papers from London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History LSE, Dept. of Economic History Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager on behalf of EH Dept. ().