Irish GDP between the Famine and the First World War: estimates based on a dynamic factor model

Abstract

A major issue in Irish economic history is the lack of national accounts before the interwar period. This paper constructs new annual estimates of real GDP between 1842 and 1913 based on a novel two-stage econometric approach. Our results show that while living standards approximately tripled in this period, development was uneven with contractions in economic activity not only during the Great Famine but also between the late 1890s and the First World War. As a proof of concept, we also apply our methodology to Swedish data. The resulting estimates closely match existing historical national accounts.

Stock markets, banks and economic growth in the UK, 1850–1913

“… 16 The series in question is the ‘Chained composite measure of UK GDP at market prices’ in the authors’ spreadsheet. All of my results are also robust to using alternative GDP series from Thomas and Dimsdale (2017), which factor in new Irish GDP estimates by Andersson and Lennard (2018) and British pre-1870 GDP estimates by Broadberry et al (2015). …”

Private Benefits, Public Vices: Railways and Logrolling in the Nineteenth-Century British Parliament

“…68 This is the discrete equivalent of the coefficient in the table: -0.16 = e -0.175 -1. 69 £594 million is the combined estimate of British and Irish nominal GDP in 1846 from Broadberry et al (2015) and Andersson and Lennard (2016).…”