We use a new trade dataset showing that nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom comparable to other parts of the “global periphery.” A sharp rise in export prices in the five decades before the scramble (1835–1885) was followed by an equally impressive decline during the colonial era. This study revises the view that the scramble for West Africa occurred when its major export markets were in decline and argues that the larger weight of West Africa in French imperial trade strengthened the rationale for French instead of British initiative in the conquest of the interior.

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.

This note introduces the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database (ETD), which provides time series of employment and real and nominal value added by 12 sectors in 51 countries for the period 1990–2018. The ETD includes 20 Asian, 9 Latin American, 4 Middle-East and North African, and 18 sub-Saharan African countries at varying levels of economic development. The ETD is constructed on the basis of an in-depth investigation of the availability and usability of statistical sources on a country-by-country basis. The ETD provides researchers with data to analyse the variety and determinants of structural transformation and supports policies aimed at sustained growth and poverty reduction.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

There is now a large volume of growth accounting estimates covering the long run experience of advanced countries. However, most of the studies in economic history are not based on state‐of‐the‐art methods. There is a trade‐off between maintaining international comparability and achieving the best results for individual countries. A one‐size‐fits‐all approach will not always do justice to the variety of historical experiences since the conventional assumptions may sometimes be inappropriate. Nevertheless, growth‐accounting studies have produced some eye‐catching results which provide food for thought both for economic historians and for growth economists. These include (1) the finding that TFP growth was comparatively slow during the First Industrial Revolution, (2) Solow's famous conclusion that TFP growth accounted for 7/8ths of American labour‐productivity growth was atypical, (3) the impact of new general‐purpose technologies on growth typically takes a long time to materialize, ICT being the notable exception and (4) that capital‐deepening was much more important relative to TFP growth in east Asian than in western European catch‐up growth. Growth accounting is undoubtedly a valuable item in the cliometrician's toolkit. Nonetheless, we anticipate the introduction of more sophisticated methods and look forward to progress in understanding what explains marked differences in TFP performance.