EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Catching-up and Falling Behind: Russian Economic Growth, 1960s-1880s

Stephen Broadberry and Elena Korchmina

No _197, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper provides decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the Russian Empire from the 1690s to the 1880s. GDP per capita in the 1880s was barely 3 per cent higher than in the 1690s, but this was not the result of continuous stagnation. Rather, positive growth during the first half of the eighteenth century was followed by negative growth between the 1760s and 1800s and stagnation from the 1800s to the 1880s. The main driver of this variation in GDP per capita was the relationship between population and land, with land per capita increasing to the 1760s, then declining to the 1800s and staying stable during the nineteenth century. This suggests that serfdom may not have been as strong a barrier to eighteenth century growth as has often been suggested, nor its abolition in 1861 as significant for subsequent growth. Although large-scale industry grew more rapidly than the rest of the economy, particularly after Peter the Great’s reforms in the early eighteenth century, this had only a minor effect on the economy as a whole, as it was starting from a very low base and still only accounted for 10 per cent of GDP by the 1880s. Russian economic growth before the 1760s resulted in catching-up on northwest Europe, but this was followed by a period of relative decline, leaving mid-nineteenth century Russia further behind than at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Date: 2022-06-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8ddb009a-30d0-4100-9bcf-895b106481a2 (text/html)

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:oxf:esohwp:_197

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:oxf:esohwp:_197