The Timing of the Climacteric and its Sectoral Incidence in the UK, 1873–1913

Feinstein, Charles H.; Matthews, R.E.F.; Odling‐Smee, John

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-06290-4_8

Cited by 20 publications

(43 citation statements)

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“…Investment/ GDP (%): . Agricultural Employment Share (%): based on Crafts (1987) andFeinstein (1972). US/UK Manufacturing Productivity (ratio): .…”

Section: Understanding the First Industrial Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, more generally, it is clearly wrong to equate measured productivity growth with contemporary technological change. Much of Britain's late 19th century productivity slowdown resulted from agriculture and mining (Feinstein et al, 1982). In these sectors, it was not so much that technical progress slowed, but rather, that they encountered other problems at that time.…”

Section: Did Late Victorian Britain Fail?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Forging Ahead and Falling Behind: The Rise and Relative Decline of the First Industrial Nation

Crafts

1998

Journal of Economic Perspectives

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In the last few decades of the 18th century and the first few of the 19th, Great Britain experienced the first Industrial Revolution and became the so-called ''workshop of the world.'' Yet, by the end of the 19th century, economic leadership had clearly passed to the United States and since then, Britain has experienced a long period of relative economic decline. Trying to understand the somewhat surprising ascendancy of Britain and how the nation then fell back to be being an also-ran has been a staple of British economic history and has generated a rich literature. The main aim of this paper is to assess the lessons of the British Industrial Revolution and its aftermath.To understand both the British Industrial Revolution and also the subsequent American overtaking of Britain, it's necessary to have a clear perspective on the nature and determinants of growth, which will include both technological, structural and productivity change, and how these interact with key differences in the economic environment. Research in cliometric history in the last 20 years has greatly improved economists' knowledge in all these aspects and now provides a plausible explanation-grounded in basic economics and a recognition of the limitations of Britain's early 19th century economy-as to why the British lead could not be maintained.Intriguingly, the explanation offered here will differ both from traditional neoclassical growth theory and also from hypotheses commonly advanced in the more recent endogenous growth theory. Traditional neoclassical growth models, which assume exogenous and universal technological progress and diminishing returns to capital accumulation, predict convergence of countries to the same steady-state rate of growth and level of income and capital per person, with initially poor coun- Nicholas Crafts is Professor of Economic History,

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“…Investment/ GDP (%): . Agricultural Employment Share (%): based on Crafts (1987) andFeinstein (1972). US/UK Manufacturing Productivity (ratio): .…”

Section: Understanding the First Industrial Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Did Late Victorian Britain Fail?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Forging Ahead and Falling Behind: The Rise and Relative Decline of the First Industrial Nation

Crafts

1998

Journal of Economic Perspectives

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“…While the Phelps-Brown and Handfield-Jones (1952) economy in this period of a little under 0.5% per year (Feinstein et al, 1982). This suggests that pessimism about productivity performance on the railways should be kept in perspective.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Total factor productivity growth on Britain’s railways, 1852–1912: A reappraisal of the evidence

Crafts

Mills

Mulatu

2007

Explorations in Economic History

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This paper revisits the issue of the productivity performance of preWorld 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.

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“…During the pre-1913 period, although the construction sector accounted for less than 5% of the GDP, the sector played a key role in the cyclical adjustments of the British economy (Thomas 1973, Feinstein et al 1982, Solomou 1987. Our aim is to evaluate the extent to which weather shocks provide a measurable supplyside shock at a sectoral level and to document the magnitudes of the effect on construction sector output.…”

Section: Weather Effects On Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The industrial production index is from Mitchell (1992 , Table D1). Real wages are calculated as average money earnings (Feinstein 1990) deflated by the cost of living index (Feinstein 1991, …”

Section: Construction Sectormentioning

confidence: 99%

Macroeconomic effects of weather shocks, 1870-1913

Solomou

Wu²

2002

Clim. Res.

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This paper considers the influence of weather shocks at a disaggregated level of analysis, modelling the effects of weather shocks on British agriculture, construction and energy demand over the period . The impact of weather shocks will vary from sector to sector as the conditions favouring one activity may be adverse to another. The sectoral effects are aggregated to give us an estimate of the macroeconomic effects of weather on business cycle fluctuations. KEY WORDS: Business cycles · Climate impactResale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher 1 Most economists dismiss Jevons' approach to economic cycles as mechanical and simplistic. In fact his theory is neither. Jevons started with the observation that it is not possible to find a solar cycle in European grain prices (Jevons 1884, p. 231). To get a more convincing theory of the British cycle, he considered fluctuations in trade with India, where on average the sunspot cycle is correlated with periodic famines. The demand shocks in India are then transmitted to the British economy via trade links. We are most grateful to a referee of this journal for elaborating this point Clim Res 20: 153-166, 2002 using the available historical sector-specific information for weather and economic data. Secondly, we aggregate the impact effect of weather shocks on the macroeconomy by aggregating the sectoral effects using a national income accounting framework. 2 The choice of Britain as our case study is partly because of data availability. However, it has the added advantage that Britain's unique production structure at the end of the 19th century, with a very small agricultural sector, makes this case study relevant for our understanding of many other economies in the first half of the 20th century. It was not until the 1950s that many other European economies had a comparable sectoral production structure.Historical analyses of the relationship between weather and the economy can help us understand the past and yield insights into how we might expect particular sectors to respond to future climatic shocks. The sectoral-climatic linkages can also help us understand the processes generating sectoral fluctuations, suggesting broader implications for modelling macroeconomic cycles. To the extent that weather shocks have an observable influence on sectoral fluctuations, real supply-side shocks should figure in sectoral business cycle behaviour. The development of modern theories of economic cycles, such as the real business cycle theory, has the potential of allowing for the importance of weather shocks as supply-side shocks to the economy. Much of the recent business cycle literature has emphasised the importance of sectoral technological shocks but has neglected the importance of weather shocks as a complementary explanation.The paper is structured as follows: Sections 2 to 4 consider the effects of weather on agriculture, construction and coal production respectively. In considering these 3 sectors it should be emphasised th...

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The Timing of the Climacteric and its Sectoral Incidence in the UK, 1873–1913

Cited by 20 publications

References 5 publications

Forging Ahead and Falling Behind: The Rise and Relative Decline of the First Industrial Nation

Forging Ahead and Falling Behind: The Rise and Relative Decline of the First Industrial Nation

Total factor productivity growth on Britain’s railways, 1852–1912: A reappraisal of the evidence

Macroeconomic effects of weather shocks, 1870-1913

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