The Sources of Growth in a Technologically Progressive Economy: The United States, 1899–1941

Gerben Bakker, Nicholas Crafts and Pieter Woltjer

The Economic Journal, 2019, vol. 129, issue 622, 2267-2294

Abstract: We develop new aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth estimates for the USA between 1899 and 1941, and sectoral estimates at the most disaggregated level so far, 38 industries. We include hard-to-measure services, and a refined measure of sectoral labour quality growth. The resulting data set supersedes Kendrick (1961), showing TFP growth lower than previously thought, broadly based across industries, and strongly variant intertemporally. The four ‘great inventions’ that Gordon (2016) highlighted were important but less dominant in TFP growth than their predecessors in the British industrial revolution. The findings also make it unlikely the 1930s had the twentieth century's highest TFP growth.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/uez002 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The sources of growth in a technologically progressive economy: the United States, 1899‐1941 (2019)
Working Paper: The Sources of Growth in a Technologically Progressive Economy: the United States, 1899-1941 (2017)
Working Paper: The sources of growth in a technologically progressive economy: the United States, 1899-1941 (2017)
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:oup:econjl:v:129:y:2019:i:622:p:2267-2294.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().