Sooner than you think: the Pre-1914 UK Productivity Slowdown was Victorian not Edwardian

Nicholas Crafts and Terence C Mills

European Review of Economic History, 2020, vol. 24, issue 4, 736-748

Abstract: This paper re-examines UK productivity growth in the decades before World War I using a new dataset compiled by the Bank of England. We find that the productivity slowdown of the early twentieth century was quite modest and does not deserve to be called a climacteric. A more serious slowdown in labour productivity growth occurred in the 1870s. Neither of these episodes should be regarded as a precedent for the current severe deterioration in UK productivity performance. Nor should a late-Victorian productivity slowdown be attributed to the end of the steam age despite the popularity of this belief.

Keywords: climacteric; growth accounting; time series modelling; productivity slowdown (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:24:y:2020:i:4:p:736-748.

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