Total factor productivity growth on Britain's railways, 1852-1912: a reappraisal of the evidence

Nicholas Crafts, Terence C. Mills and Abay Mulatu

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

Abstract: This paper revisits the issue of the productivity performance of pre-World War I Britain’s railway system with an improved dataset and with modern time-series econometrics. We find a slowdown in TFP growth between 1850 and 1870, after which it stabilized at about 1.1%. An analysis of company-level productivity rejects the claims that there was a regulation-induced revival of productivity performance in the railway sector after 1900 but, on the other hand, it supports the claim that there was some managerial failure during the period.

JEL-codes: B1 L92 N0 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2005-02
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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22553/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Total factor productivity growth on Britain's railways, 1852-1912: A reappraisal of the evidence (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:wpaper:22553

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