Accounting for Growth in History

Abstract

The contributions to this Special Issue present the state of the art of growth accounting in economic history, exhibiting its strengths and weaknesses. Three set of articles compose the issue: comparative papers that discuss the challenges ahead, long‐run perspectives on Britain since the Industrial Revolution, Japan, Italy and Spain from the late‐19th century, and Latin America during the 200 years since independence, and post‐World War II episodes under Soviet and Fabian socialism and the transition to market economies in Eastern Europe and India. The papers reveal how sensitive the interpretation of results is to the quality of output and inputs and the growth accounting procedure employed and the need to adopt the new developments in growth accounting to improve economic history narrative.

Technology adoption in autocratic economies: The role of fiscal capacity

“…CTFP is the unexplained percentage difference between a country's GDP per capita and US GDP per capita after controlling for differences in physical and human capital stocks. In principle, if one ignores differences in managerial, natural, and other unobserved inputs, CTFP measures the country's technology and the efficiency of the factor allocation relative to the United States (Acs et al, 2014; Barro, 1999; Hall & Jones, 1999; Prados de la Escosura et al, 2021). I use CTFP to measure the country's distance from the global technology frontier, that is, .…”

“…; Prados de laEscosura et al, 2021). I use CTFP to measure the country's distance from the global technology frontier, that is, ∕ .Second, I code democracy and autocracy using the polity2 democracy score from the Polity 5 dataset for regime characteristics.…”