Productivity growth in the Industrial Revolution: a new growth accounting perspective

Nicholas Crafts

Proceedings, 2002, issue Nov

Abstract: The issue of why productivity growth during the British industrial revolution was slow despite the arrival of famous inventions is revisited using a growth accounting methodology based on an endogenous innovation model and the perspective of recent literature on general purpose technologies. The results show that steam had a relatively small and long-delayed impact on productivity growth when benchmarked against later technologies such as electricity or ICT. Even so, technological change including embodiment effects accounted entirely for the acceleration in labor productivity growth that allowed the economy to withstand rapid population growth without a decline in living standards.

Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/crafts.pdf Full Text (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Productivity Growth in the Industrial Revolution: A New Growth Accounting Perspective (2004)
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:fip:fedfpr:y:2002:i:nov:x:1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Proceedings from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Research Library ().